“Greatest physics-based game that doesn’t use real physics” a Post-Mortem of a travesty

What Went Wrong

I honestly don’t know where to begin. I will start by saying after LD33 I spent about 95% of my time trying to better my game development skills. Learning how to do different things, like rotating towards an object or creating a mouse zoom. I even watched several videos on Khan’s Academy on Calculus and Trigonometry because I never learned those back in High School. I really thought I was prepared for this LD and then the themes were announced and I was like ‘yeah I got this’. Well I didn’t have this… heck I didn’t have anything.

All that preparing went right out the windows. I started making some art like I normally do and starting drawing blanks on how to actually implement the ideas I had. So I changed my idea around and came up with a new one then I went to bed. Woke up Saturday morning and started in on my new idea. a couple of hours later I was like “This is totally not fun at all”. So I scraped it and stated in on another idea I had thought of which also turned out to not be fun. At this point I was getting frustrated and depressed. Its such a motivator killer to discover your game is no fun. It was at that point that I gave up…. I was out of the Compo and boy was I depressed. I’ve never failed to make a game in all the times I’ve entered the LD.

Being a failure is no fun. I sulked and moped around the house the rest of the night then I went to bed. Woke up Sunday morning and had a thought about a game I could make. I came down stairs and did a little prototyping. I liked the results so I continued to flesh it out. I was inspired! Now I only had 8 hour as I had a prior engagement that would take about 4 hours. I was able to reuse some of the art I had created on Saturday so that made me happy it didn’t go to waste. I was half done when I again realized the game was not as good as some of my other games, as it was only mildly fun. Alright I’ll be honest… its no fun at all :) so when something is not fun you need to make it funny! lol!

What Went Right

1. I made a game!

I need to start strong as I don’t really have anything else… So yeah, I made a game for LD 34 and I’m not a failure!

If you’d like to try and judge for yourself you can play it here

I ask 2 things though.

1. If you do try it out please leave feedback.
2. The track only goes to 20, if for some odd reason you get beyond that can you leave feedback on how you did it. In all of my testing I never got past 11 or 12.