Ludum Dare 27 Post Mortem
This time around I've managed to get to writing this in a more timely fashion. Ludum Dare 27 was almost two weeks ago, and so the judging is still going on for my entry "Get to the Choppa!". Overall this Ludum Dare went much smoother than the previous. The theme this time around was "10 Seconds" which lent itself to the game idea I had in mind.
The Idea
Learning from the experience I had in Ludum Dare 26, I decided that having a better defined idea for the game before the theme was announced would make the development go much smoother. I had been playing Organ Trail when I had time to kill in July and August, and I was enjoying the simplicity of the scavenging missions. I knew that I wouldn't be devoting the full weekend to this Ludum Dare like I had the last, so I thought aiming for gameplay similar to this for my entry would be reasonable. I also loved the retro style of Organ Trail, and so I wanted the game to be visually similar.
The Saturday before Ludum Dare I happened to re-watch this awesome Predator video and "GET TO THE CHOPPA!" popped into my head. I knew now what the goal of every level of my game would be: Getting to that choppa! Since CoffeeScript and Crafty.js hadn't been a bad experience, I decided to use them again for implementing the game. I described the idea to some of my friends and luckily they wanted to help. When it came time for the theme to be announced it could not have been more perfect: "10 Seconds". More like: "10 Seconds to get to the choppa!".
Getting to the Choppa!
We didn't get started until late in the day Saturday. I wanted to reuse any components that we could from MetroGnome, however the way most were implemented they were not easy to drop in the way I had hoped. In the end we used this code as a reference for where to begin when we had questions with how to do something. Specifically, I had not touched anything with sprites when we worked on MetroGnome, so being able to see how this was implemented in MetroGnome was awesome.
Since the team working on Get to the Choppa! was smaller this time around it was much easier to divvy work out and implement features concurrently. While I was working on loading assets and animating the sprites others were working on enemy movement and bullets. Since we had an idea of what we wanted the game to play like and how it should look, the art quickly came together, in fact it was finished two or three hours after we started working.
What that went well:
- Graphics
- Having a concept before the theme was announced
- Gameplay
- Smaller team
- Smaller scope
What could have been better:
- CoffeeScript/JavaScript can resemble insanity
- We still need more experience with Crafty.js
- No sound
Overall this Ludum Dare flowed much better than the previous one. Having a concept before the competition started was huge, as well as having a smaller team and scope. Despite going better overall, I still found myself working on the project up to the deadline. When I reached the point where it was time to implement the level loader, I kept finding bugs. Part of this is due to the dynamic nature of JavaScript. It's easy to develop something quickly with JavaScript or CoffeeScript, but it's a pain to debug.
Despite it's flaws, I'm still happy with the outcome: Get to the Choppa!.
Next Time
So, after participating in the last two Ludum Dare Game Jams, I've definitely found that having a concept prior to the event is huge and I will most certainly have an idea before the next one. I've used Crafty.js and CoffeeScript for both competitions, and despite the rough spots I will likely use them again. I would really like to take some of the pieces that we developed for MetroGnome and Get to the Choppa! and work on their design so that we can potentially reuse them in the next Ludum Dare. I also feel that getting the level loader up earlier (this was the last piece I worked on) would be huge. The game didn't feel like a game until the levels were loading.
The next Ludum Dare will be sometime in December. I hope to devote more time to it than I did for this one.