Rampart: A Post-Mortem

Overview

Regardless of how ratings turn out, I think this was my most successful game jam experience to-date. I went in after the first couple hours with a really solid vision, and made a game!

The Good

• The Scope: I really nailed the scope this time around. I had a working prototype by mid-Saturday, so after that I could focus on graphics, music, and polish.

• The Squashing: I didn't have many difficult game-breaking bugs this event either; without any 4-hour forehead-bangers I was able to spend more time generating content.

• The Prep: For the first time in a compo, I started out with a little base code (a resource I'm writing for pygame called pyracy. This really helped out with simple stuff, like handling spritesheets, which I've been writing from scratch for previous events.

• The Sound/Music: Turns out I'm surprisingly creative at 1am. Whoda thunk.

• The Aesthetic: It came pretty naturally, some little thematic bits come back in a few places. The main character is a ram with spiral horns, so there are spirals in the clouds and in the tiles in the arena center.

The Meh

• The Instructions: Game isn't very intuitive, and some of the user feedback is lacking, especially for how it is scored. I spent a lot of time on usability features like camerawork, sfx, and "smoothness" that I overlooked some of the mechanically-relevant usability pieces.

• The Rocks: Ugh. I drew a freaking floating sky arena but I can't make an aesthetic rock.

Almost to 20 ratings

You can play and rate my game here. Thanks for the feedback and support!