Long Shot Post-Mortem

With the jam finally winding to a close, it's time for my usual look back at how the development of my entry went: what went well, what went badly, and what I can improve upon for future game jams.

First of all, I'd like to say a massive thank you to everyone who's played my entry Long Shot so far! If you haven't yet, please do play and rate it, and I'll do my best to get round to rating yours in return before the rating period ends!

What Went Well

• After my LD48 and LD50 entries were published in extremely buggy, broken states, Long Shot ended up being much more stable and bug-free. The only major bugs were a memory issue that caused the game to start lagging after a while (which took about a week to be discovered) and some missing sound effects (which nobody noticed because nobody knew they were supposed to be there!). It's good to get back to making stable releases again.
• Long Shot feels like one of my most polished entries yet, with its slick logo, scrolling starfield background, and various other touches. Its rating on Newgrounds is a solid 3.51/5, the highest of any of my Ludum Dare entries, which would serve to back that up.
• My previous TIC-80 games have either had music that was poorly-received, or no music at all. Long Shot, however, has received quite a lot of praise for its music, so I think I may finally have gotten the hang of composing good-sounding music in TIC-80. That should hopefully serve me well in the future.

What Went Badly

• My ADHD kicked my ass big time during this jam. I struggled to focus, and kept goofing off and wasting time. While I got the game done and polished with time to spare, I honestly feel like I could have put so much more work into it, and added so much more variety, had I been able to concentrate more.
• The game takes a lot of inspiration from Prism Indigo, the bullet hell shooter I released earlier this year. While very little code was actually copied directly from it, much of the rest of the code is probably very similar. This helped compensate for my lack of focus and avoid the game-breaking bugs I've had in the past, but it also feels unsatisfying. I've used past Ludum Dares to experiment with new genres and push my boundaries, and this time round I didn't do that. (It is a departure from my usual narrative-driven style, so there's that...)
• The game's endless nature and randomised waves mean there's no difficulty ramp: it stays at the same level forever. This gets boring pretty fast, and also means you can theoretically play the game forever if you're good enough at it. I did think of ways of include a difficulty ramp - having the enemies move faster over time, and/or reducing the time between waves - but couldn't think of a way to make it work.

What Comes Next

I don't know whether I'll be competing in Ludum Dare 52, as it happens to fall on my birthday. I may take it off like I did LD49. Either way, in future game jams I need to be more disciplined, and make sure I keep my head down and don't slack off, though I also need to be careful that I don't burn myself out like I have done before.

Speaking of burning myself out, I intend to take a break from programming after the rating period ends, as I've done quite a lot over the past couple of months. Once I get back into it, I'll be releasing another patch or two for Prism Indigo and then resuming work on Prism Warriors, the upcoming sequel.

Later tonight, I'll be releasing one last update to Long Shot to fix those missing sound effects. After that, I intend to refine the concept and use it for an unlockable game mode in the deluxe version of Prism Warriors. I think there's still a lot of potential I can draw out of it, especially as it can piggyback off of the much higher level of variety that Prism Warriors will naturally have.

Once again, thank you all for your kind words, and I wish you all the best of luck when the results come in!