mini postmortem: Unwatered

Yo, jammers...

So, after taking a break for 1 or 2 Ludum Dares, I had an eye on this one. I was sure the theme would be the Night one, or the Unconventional Transport, and I had an idea for each, but of course it wasn't those. I struggled a bit, but by mid-Saturday I chose this physics puzzler. The plant starts with no water (yeah, I'm sure you'll see cleverer interpretations of the theme!). I'm also sure that those iOS water physics puzzle games were in my mind somewhere.

I started by finding how to do the water effect, and luckily found a great tutorial and I had that coded very quickly, much to my surprise. I then lost motivation a bit, and didn't do much until later. Then, I got sketching, which was a nice change from using an app to draw graphics. Don't think they took me more than 30 mins:

That was it for Saturday. I slept on it, and was in 2 minds if I had the determination to complete anything.

Sunday: up early, decided to do it. I scanned the images, and used 'trace bitmap' in Inkscape (smooths them out a bit), and applied the Roughen filter (sort of like the old Rhubard and Custard cartoons). They looked alright! Acceptable.

I got the main 2 platform types running pretty easily -- not too much physics weirdness to fight with. The general menus, game controller stuff killed a few hours, but can't be avoided. By midday I was ready to make levels. 5 was my limit, but I tried to make them all fairly different, and not overly difficult to complete.

It was fortunate I left the evening for the upload as the first error I got was 'No WebGL module' - turns out I didn't install it... Then, I was rusty with WebGl and itch.io in general.

What went well:

• Hand-drawn graphics were cool to do - so quick!
• Getting the meta ball code working right away. Without that, the water would look bad, and there'd be no game.
• General timing of Sunday, worked very hard but got it done.
• Game plays as I had hoped. Maybe slightly better even.

What could've gone better:

• Making better use of Day 1.
• _Another_ physics game.
• Very little time for testing. Screen resolutions / aspect ratios still cause me some grief.
• No time for fancy audio or music, a common thing for me to not focus on, sadly. 5 minutes in Sfxr at end of Day 2.
• Maybe bit more variation in mechanics, though Levels 4 and 5 hint at some different style of level.
• Didn't have dev environment fully tested and ready.

Laters, and well done if you completed your game.

Play UNWATERED here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/unwatered (WebGL + Windows dl).