Post-thingum

So mostly I write these post-mortem things as little letters to my future self in the hopes that next time I can do better.

What I Made:

Possibly the dumbest game I could possibly have made. A two button beat em up. Things coming at you from the left? Press left. Things coming at you from the right? Press right. Behold 48h Compo entry, Super Lefty Garden Fighty. And lo, it was stupid. The Earth has been ruined: the world’s trees have been consumed by a race of Cauliflower monsters. Luckily, if you kill enough of them, a tree come back. That’s the backstory.

Super Lefty Garden Fighty

What Was I Thinking

I was thinking that if I made a really really really simple game that required no level design, no tricky mechanics I could get all the programming done really quickly and then polish it… TO DEATH.

I wanted it to be beautiful. And lo, it was beautiful… and empty.

Like a Tim Burton film.

Turns out though this mechanic was slightly more complex than I initially thought. I needed to control the behaviour of the baddies to make sure that they didn’t clump up together, but I couldn’t quite fix the thing where it’s actually pretty hard to avoid getting kicked to death by a single baddy. Oh, who am I kidding? This is totally noddy.

What Went Badly

Well, once again, I panicked when trying to come up with a game idea and did the wrong thing. I never give myself enough time. The game is, once you get into it, pretty fun for a short while, but it doesn’t have enough depth or variety to have any long term playability. The difficulty maxes out after a few minutes but most people should find that fairly easy to handle.

What Went Well

I’m pretty chuffed with the art, the animations (especially the tree growing animation) and the graphics in general. The game engine and editor also performed really well this time – I didn’t need to add any features or fix any bugs, nothing went particularly wrong. The whole build was actually surprisingly smooth.

Because I had so much time I was able to do a proper UI for this. Indicators for score, for progress on tree making and also feedback information about hit streaks (and also hopefully explain how to play the game). Little touches like that go a long way to making the game feel like it’s paying attention to what you’re doing, and give the player secondary objectives in addition to chasing a high score.

Next time, Gadget. Next time.

So next time I want to do something intelligent. This was too dumb.

Way too dumb. Like P.E. Teacher* dumb.

I look at some of the fantastic and surprisingly deep games that have been made this time and I realise I need to challenge myself to make different types of games now.

Time lapsed.

I did a timelapse!

*”P.E. Teachers”, also known as “Phys Ed Teachers”, or “Gym Teachers” or “Coach” but universally recognised that when you have 100 of them together, you have a collective IQ of exactly 100.