Postmortem: Henry Snackleworth’s Weird Day

Lessons Learned

For my second Ludum Dare, I wanted to learn from my mistakes of LD35 (post mortem here), and I did:

• Use a framework that produces fast results (switching from Cocos2D to Game Maker)
• Don’t worry too much about code architecture
• Stock up on food before, not during the competition

Preparation

About two weeks before the competition, I started teaching myself the basics of Game Maker and was impressed that my biggest worry, learning the script language in a short amount of time, was completely unfounded. It was really smooth to work with, once I got my head around how variable scope works.

Knowing that I easily get distracted with other people around, I asked my family whether they would visit friends for the weekend. I’m really grateful that my wife supports eccentricities like that, so I had the house to myself. I went grocery shopping the day before and was ready to go.

Starting off

I woke up in the morning to the theme One Room and started brainstorming over breakfast. I had some neat ideas, like a puzzle game with floor plan aesthetics or a game where you play an anthropomorphic house with arms and legs that runs around and eats people and has a party going on in it’s stomach (i.e. room).

Since I usually tend to plan things through to the end, I was sort of hesistant to go with any of these ideas because I had no clear plan what the game would look like and I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to pull it off. More about that later.

So I ended up with a single room boss rush game and a “Mega Man”-esque mechanic of collecting skills from the bosses you beat. I knew this wasn’t very innovative but I really like the genre and thought it was a good idea to get to know Game Maker, as the game uses proven game mechanics that I could look up if I ran into trouble. I had the wild plan to add custom sound effects and voice recording to comment on the player’s actions throughout the game.

After I had run out of time at the end of developing my previous LD game Grokh’s Arena, I decided I would try to finish the programming part on day one so I would have time to polish the assets and do the balancing on day two.

Day 1

I made good progress on the first day getting player animation and movement in place, including attacking, jumping on platforms and double jumping. I had controller support. I added one of three planned bosses including its AI, but by the end of the day I knew I would be in trouble for the Compo deadline. Two more bosses needed to be done plus all music and sound effects. I still dreamed of adding voice work, so I mentally prepared to skip the Compo and go for the Jam.

Day 2

The second day saw more progress as I added a second monster complete with AI and a hub room from which to select the different boss fights. As that day drew to a close I had to make a decision: Either wrap up what I had so far, scrapping the third boss, or go for the Jam and take that extra day to get closer to my original vision. After handing in a somewhat incomplete game to LD35 I couldn’t bring myself to leave it in its current state. I had to go for the Jam.

Day 3

On the third day I added the third boss but had to realize that even with the time extension, it would be a close call. I gave up on the voice work and the custom sound effects and planned for a quick composition of music towards the end. After I finalized my player graphics, got a proper ending and start screen done and only had to finish music and sound, I realized that I forgot how long my composition process usually takes. After I had everything in place it was tuning time and around 2:00 in the morning, and I was completely beat. I spent an hour fiddling with the numbers to make the game somewhat playable, but it didn’t really come together, so I handed it in and called it a day, knowing that the gameplay was a bit wonky.

The verdict: The Good

I learned a lot about Game Maker during these three days and now feel right at home with it. I will definitely keep it as my weapon of choice for next time and hope that development will go a little faster when I know what to do and how to crunch down on bugs.

I also feel confident about the amount of content in the final game. Three bosses including custom graphics, animation and AI make me feel pretty good. I am especially proud of the game’s ending, as that came out really nicely.

In retrospect I also feel good about keeping some of the good practices from last time, like getting enough sleep and not going overboard on the sweet snacks.

The verdict: The Bad

I’m pretty bummed out that I only made it to the Jam, as I feel that handing in a completed game all by yourself to the Compo is an accomplishment in itself, and I will definitely strive for that goal again next time. When it comes to planning, I need to learn to better contrast my goals with the effort it takes to achieve them. It was a problem last time and it was a problem this time. I know that I’m not good at this and I need to force myself to do better in this area.

When commenting on entries, I generally like to suggest the video The Art of Screenshake where appropriate as it gives good pointers on achieving a more visceral feeling in a game, and I totally missed using some of the basic rules that make action games fun. If I’d had more time and energy left, I would certainly have added more polish of that kind to the game.

Speaking of energy: Tweaking a game is tough. I shouldn’t push that to my last hours when I’m mentally exhausted. But this ties into the whole point of setting realistic goals. I thought it would be ideal to keep at least half a day open for music, sound effects and special effect and still have enough time for several tweaking sessions spread over that time to get a fresh perspective after doing something different in between.

About visuals: I feel that the game looks pretty unspectacular. From reading the comments so far, at least one other person thought the same. Initially I thought it was because I didn’t have time to shade my characters properly, but there are many games around here that look awesome with even more limited palettes. And then it struck me that I am not good at choosing colours. My graphics lack contrast, I have absolutely no interplay of light and dark, no shadows. This is definitely an area I should work on to make my games stand out more.

When it comes to the choice of a topic, I really should have considered doing one of the more innovative game ideas I initially had. I didn’t have the complete game mechanics planned out in my head and being the control freak that I am, that made me uncomfortable. For my next LD I will try to pick a more challenging concept and avoid shovelling in content from the get-go. Try to get that running smoothly and add content bit by bit to have a safe fallback point. I’ll try to challenge myself not to plan too much ahead and rather experiment with one idea until a game emerges, instead of trying to plan a complete game ahead.

Wrapping Up

This postmortem sounds like I am frustrated by my entry, but I’m really not. I tend to be a pessimistic person, but I know that I learned a lot this time. I am comfortable using a new framework, I can now rapid prototype a game, I grew a better mindset as a gamejam dev and I will try to build upon these for the next Ludum Dare.

For now, if you want to give Henry Snackleworth’s Weird Day a spin, please be my guest:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-37/?action=preview&uid=83463