Learning to Dance – PostMortem

This was probably the first Ludum Dare in which I was actually almost completely happy with the end product. What I amount that happiness to is the personal goals I set for myself. Instead of having my goal be about making a complete game at the end, I made it about having a game full of music and art that I was happy with. Another goal I had was to try to make another story-based game. I wanted a cohesive experience that used art, and music to help the story telling. My last goal was to not get bogged down by programming. I didn’t want something difficult, I wanted something simple that I could whip out. I knew that programming was the one aspect of LD that (at least in recent times) has bogged me down and de-motivated me to the point where I was not happy with my product. Don’t get me wrong, I love programming, but gamedev programming has been hard for me recently and I wanted to continue my break from it. I also had a bonus goal, which was this: Live record my music. Instead of using all of the software instruments to create my music, I wanted to record it myself. At least a little bit. I succeeded.

With these goals in mind, I knew there was a high likely hood that my success hinged on the theme. So I decided that if a theme was chosen that I didn’t like, I would go with my own theme (I choose the theme “Isolation” for this). A lot of people wouldn’t agree with this, however this time around I didn’t want the theme to be the challenging factor, I wanted it to be a guiding factor. Sometimes if I make a game based off of a a theme I don’t like, I’ll produce a loveless game. Luckily there were two themes for me, which worked out super well. I think that the dual theme was a great point about this LD, many games were produced that were fantastic, as well as a good variety of games.

What follows is a day by day account of my process.

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