It was supposed to be the calm today, I think I misunderstood the timers 😁 Our man Mike has been tallying up the results and just released them 8 hours ago. I will check with @lizz later today, so I don't know what our results are.
This LudumDare went pretty well for us! I have had worse weekends to be honest. Why? Well:
- Lizz and I reached our goal of making people go back to their childhood memories while playing our game
- The development went very smooth for an LD entry. It was almost sus to be honest
- We ended up with a stable game without major compromises.
- The game collected a lot of unique drawings and that brought a big smile to our faces
Maybe.. This time it went a bit too smooth. You see, every jam entry of mine had good, bad and sometimes ugly sides.
| # | The Good 👍🏾 | The Bad 👎🏾 | The Ugly 🚽 |
|---|---|---|---|
| LD47 | Set up entire basecode for future LudumDares to come. This one is my first one and holds a special place in my heart | Game was 'just a game', it did not have juice, the theme was not really interestingly implemented | The collision system was really time consuming and in the end the physics were mediocre to say the least. Also, I ripped textures from the internet, changed the heu and called it a day. I disabled ratings for that |
| LD48 | The character creator and the results of other player's outcome on my website was very well received | The music was ripped from youtube and was very badly implemented. I disabled audio ratings ofcourse. | Oh man.... I spent soooo many hours creating a branching dialog tree. I did not enjoy that 😅🙊 |
| LD49 | My first time working together with my friend. We had a big laugh about the idea of a mentally unstable person trying to keep it together in a resteaurant | The game was not very intuitive to play | We did not have a clear vision. This game was not finished. |
| LD50 | My first |
It was a hard game to play. The balancing could have been better. We had to release some post-jam versions | - |
| LD51 | We had a working prototype pretty early on | Brave and Firefox have some advanced technologies which don't play well with colliders in this game. This is a problem that gradually became more prominent. | - |
| LD52 | I had lots of fun making this one. As a programmer I just smiled the whole way when programming the 'DNA' systems for the plants | Game was a bit hard to understand I feel | - |
| LD53 | My first colab with my gf. People felt the frantic energy we wanted to go for | Lots of dialog was lost, as it was too much. We had to scrap a lot. | Stitching all the dialog to the puzzle elements for later was a nightmare. Dialog is not my strongest skill I feel |
| LD54 | We had a prototype veeeery early on. Development went smooth | Brave and Firefox have some advanced technologies which don't play well with colliders in this game. We had to change the scope constantly. Our original idea was compromised | - |
| LD55 | We experimented with graphics and paralaxing and that went pretty well I think! | We wanted more levels, the whole game was prepaired for that. It was beautiful, and then the deadline was like right around the corner 🙊 | - |
| LD56 | We had a base idea in mind, so we could build right away. There was even boilerplate code. We had a prototype right away. | We had a base idea in mind, so we could build right away. We had to shoehorn the time into the intended gameplay | We had a base idea in mind, so we could build right away. There were lots of problems trying to balance this thing. Oh my.. It was difficult. People did not seem to have lots of fun with this one |
| LD57 | The graphics were very good in this one I feel. The boilerplate code was var enough along that I could focus on other aspects. The music was a placeholder but ended up in the game anyway and people went crazy about it~! The scope was not compromised, despite it having 7 levels :o | There were collision problems. I fixed that in the post-jam version. It wrecked playtroughs | - |
| LD58 | Development went pretty smooth! All our goals were reached. We had a comfortable time. | - | - |
And that is what I will do diffrent next time. I want to feel pain.
Yes, you heard me right. I don't like it when a game feels perfect. When everything went right. Its like sports; "did you even do it right if you don't feel muscle pain aferwards?" . I want to feel pain and suffering during gamejams. It's an indicator of growth. All I did now was making a game (a pretty fun game 😁) and not learning anything from it. Ofcourse, it's nice to have a good time once in a while. But at this point, I feel like this jamming is becomming second nature. Every jam I ask myself: what could I do better next time?
Right now I ask myself the same question. The awnser? Don't make it better, try harder to expand my knowledge and skills! So next gamejam could be a disaster, but hopefully I will learn. Things I can grow in?
- 3D work,
- Creating non-pixel-art graphics,
- Proper music mixing
- Learning the program "pixel composer"
Regarding PelPurrfect:
The boilerplate code I made is called PelPurrfect. I intend to release it to alpha / beta for everyone to try out before next LD starts. I have developed it pretty extensively the last couple of months and this time was a testrun. It worked nice, but had some major flaws I will fix. I also wrote a whole dialog system for it this LD, with timers and subtitle support and all! These are the things that need to change:
- The whole thing works with scenes. Assets are loaded when a scene is loaded. So some assets are loaded multiple times. There needs to be a global asset loader-thingy.
- Every scene needs to have some kind of reset function, so levels can get reset when the player dies for instance
- When the game starts, all assets are loaded in. Our game had 50MB of audio files. It was slow. I want to make a loading indicator for players to see that the game does not freeze
- Utility functions need to be more clear. Stuff like converting colors, getting random numbers, splitting color channels, etc.
- GUI handling needs to be much better.
- I need to write documentation. The tooling is already there, so that should not be a problem.
Conculsion
I learned a lot the past couple of years, to the point gamejamming feels like second nature. Which was nice for once, but I want to feel the pain of growth. PelPurrfect had a good testrun, but needs some work until I can release it for testing.
Later today I will see the results and depending on that I will either: complain, be satisfied, or post a picture of a cake if I feel very happy!
... OK bye!
