Pet Protecc TD - Postmortem

Mandatory link to the entry

Background

Well, it comes to no one's surprise that most of us have spent weeks in lockdown by now. Some of us have been privileged enough to be able to work from home, but an inconvenient is that all days end up resembling each other. As a programmer, that means that I've consciously refrained from looking at a single line of code during the weekends in order to rest and to make those two days feel slightly different. For that reason I wasn't planning on joining this edition.

Despite that resolution I kept being up to date, checking the themes, voting and so on. When the theme was announced, I thought that Keep it Alive was really promising, so I started brainstorming ideas, even if by that point I was still fooling myself on the "will not be in" camp.

Eventually, a seemingly silly A + B mashup formed in my head and clicked: "What if I cross Tamagotchi with a tower defense?" 🤔

I thought the idea offered lots of potential, both genres could benefit from each other and, most importantly, seemed easy to prototype and scope down.

At that point I'd lost more than 12h but I had severely nerd-sniped myself, so I decided to give it a go.

Source: XKCD

And well, here we are now. To be fair, I am reasonably happy with the result.

What went well

- Slipping to jam mode. This is my first ~successful~ jam mode submission, but I prefer to participate in the compo mode, and I had expected to do so. By late Sunday, though, even if the game was playable enough to be submitted, I felt I would be doing it a disservice because I did like the idea but the implementation lacked a lot of polish. I sacrificed my pride, fell back to jam and that seemed to be the right call.
Even if jam proved the right call despite having to work on Monday, and the piling exhaustion, I managed to create all-new art for the game, review the levels, create a bunch of game screens and could even get some sound effects in. Not bad!

For comparison, this is how the game looked like by the end of Sunday:
https://youtu.be/a3P6SCMRsVM

And this is how the submission entry looks:
https://youtu.be/NXk0DCoBOM4

• Game mechanics are easy to layer and iterate. 48h-72h (a lot less in practice) usually mean that no matter how much you've scoped down from your original idea, it's probably not enough. Luckily, this game can scale easily, so feature development and content creation could be layered. Even if I had to cut stuff (more on that later), I could have something playable with a clear goal at all times from relatively early.

• Haxeflixel. I hadn't touched this since LD42, favouring Unity instead, and I tend to forget some stuff, so I was slightly concerned that I could run into hiccups trying to figure out something obvious.. However, everything went pretty smooth, and some built-in features, like some simple pathfinding, saved me hours of development 💕 I had a couple of issues porting the game to Android, but some library updates and logcat detective work sorted things out easily.

• Graphics. People seem to like them 🙂 I think they're more or less consistent and the palette apparently works well.

What could have gone better

• Slipping to jam mode. Yeah, I said it was the right call, but I still regret not being able to make it in time for a compo submission. Would I have been able to make it to compo if I had started 3-4 hours earlier than I did? I'll have to live with the doubt now.

• Graphics. Even if people seem to like the game graphics and colour palette, and I do dig myself some parts of it, I still feel that it's not as good as it should. Mobs could be better, UI graphics could be better or provide clearer feedback, and the game could certainly use more animation and effects.

• Cut features. On my TO-DO list there were more turrets, turret upgrades, additional pet interactions, passive bonuses depending on how well taken care of the pet is and, the jewel of the crown, conditional pet evolution with consequences to gameplay (skills). Press F for all of them, please.

• Few levels, so-so balance.

• No time for music or sfx polish. SFX made it in the last hour,so it's expected that some of the effects are lackluster or even grating if they're used often.

As always, thanks for keeping up with me up to here. If you're still interested and don't feel like scrolling all the way up, you can play it and rate it here :)