After a lot of feedback much of which echoed my own feelings about my game i think it is time for a post mortem.

The idea

Every jam has to start with an idea, this one was a bit hard for me. After brainstorming i came up with the following idea:

A side scroller acton/adventure game in a hyperloop that has a “speed(movie)” kind of idea, don’t go below a certain speed or you blow up. So in that way you would be stuck in the hyperloop.

Quick functionality was

Train part

In the train you would have mostly some puzzle parts to fix certain parts to keep up to speed. walk around explore discover and talk to npc’s to get a feeling of danger. And eventually disarm the bomb

Head office part

Meanwhile the head office of the hyperloop would be under attack by the same attackers and this would be kind of the same as the hyperloop except you would need to avoid the terrorist and try to free the office, this part would have most of the fighting / action. You would switch between these scenarios. (Diane would have been a playable character)

The refinement

Knowing that i always try to do to much during a jam, i decided to sit back and let the idea cool for a while. After this i looked what would be possible to do.

The office part was scrapped and only the hyperloop stayed, with a small change in story and actual terrorists on the hyperloop/

I created a MoSCoW list (which was actually more a MoCO list) on a whiteboard and prioritized the list. Fighting and most mini games except the bomb where could have. And were below the planned polishing/balancing testing.

I roughly gave each point a timeframe and i went off.

The art

For art in games i usually use vector art as it is easier to scale quick to make and easy to adapt/animate. However it usually doesn’t look the best. This time with the extensive planning i did i felt that there was time for some pixel art.

I used aseprite for this and gave myself a limited pallet (that did grow a bit over time).

The good

I do think the graphics look much better than what i did before. By planning good and itemizing certain graphics i was able to easily make some small difference here and there I think it fits this genre more.

The bad

It took more time than i expected especially animating the walking cycle. I am still not fully happy with it but for the jam it was good enough. However because it took more time i had to skip idle animations and npc animations. Also the art is a bit more messy there are random pixels sometimes or pixels are transparent where they should not.

Biggest complain about the game is the unreadable font. i liked the font (still do) and could read it fine, only thing i did not think of is that i knew the story so of course i could recognize it. Afterwards looking at it from a distance i do see that with the colors and background it was not a good fit for a game that needed a lot of reading

The music

I used lmms and musicmaker for this.

My goal was to make either a few pieces of music or one large one that had a lots of variety. It became the second, i realy have a bad ear for making music but i did what i could.

The good

I like it has become a large piece of music that does not loop to often. I do think it is a good track (if i say so my self) I actually did not spend to much time on it

The bad

Since i have no affinity for this i was happy fast when i had something that sounded good, getting so caught up in it that i forgot what kind of game i was making. I think the soundtrack is a bit to happy for a game that should bring suspense. But no more time to change it.

The coding

For coding i used the mono version of Godot

The good

I love Godot and i like c# as it feels closer to what i am used to, coding went pretty fast and i used the signal system of Godot extensively. Using git and actually making branches per level/part of the game (which saved me but later more about that).

The bad

The code i wrote is awe-full, as expected from a jam i did not think much about architecture and i changed how i did things halfway leaving the old way intact which cause a fair amount of bugs.

The crash

Here i actually almost quit ludum dare.

I just finished off the third part of the game (from talking to bald guy to second phone call) inclusive some visual changes like an overlay for the feeling of depth (walking in a door frame and behind poles).

I was happy as i was ahead of schedule and was sure i could work a bit more on diversifying the scene, testing cleaning up some sprites and maybe even redo the walking animation and have time to add a basic fighting.

The crash happened. Suddenly Godot did not find my code changes anymore, there was a weird cashing problem going on and nothing i did helped, restarting godot, restarting the pc cleaning build ect.

At that moment i had only one option left and that was to remove the caching directories. Disaster. While i did not lost much code i did lose everything i did in Godot’s editor that connected everything like signals, sprites ,scenes. The thing that saved me was that i actually had committed a lot of branches already so i did not lose everything.

I did actually commit often before bit this time it was around dinner time and i did not commit before or after dinner because i was on a roll. So i lost nearly 3 hours of code and an exra hour, hour and a half to have everything work again as before.

This made it so i had little time to finish the last part (searching, dismantling bomb minigame, playtesting, balancing). The dismantling of the bomb screen which is a huge cop-out actually was added in the last 5 min of the compo to at least have a ending.

Conclusion

Next time i will do the same as now create an idea, start some art work as that is needed anyway and then revisit the idea to refine it to something more manageable.

My lesson is however to commit even more often and playtest more. And think a little bit more about the code before typing. It doesnt have to be a master piece but it would be nice that everything worked the same. One of the most noticable bugs (textbox staying in screen) was because of a switch in how i did things and not setting something to false because later that was not needed anymore.

In the end i think the game ended up well with the necessary bugs and glitches but it is playable if a bit hard to read. And i hope that people still enjoy playing it.