Little Sunshine - LD46 Postmortem

Good morning my little rays of sunshine! It’s now a little more than 48 hours since I handed in my game for the 46th Ludum Dare  Game Jam (COMPO). It was my very first game jam, and the very first game I completed all by myself! This is my sunny postmortem to remind me of the more cloudy parts of the Jam, to make it better the next time.

All in all, it was a fantastic experience creating this game in such a short amount of time, and I am delighted with the result, even if it may not look much to others. Check it out here: https://bloham.itch.io/little-sunshine

THE GOOD

- I made a game in 48 hours that can be called a game! For a month, I work on an endless racer I want to release on the Appstore but get stuck at every corner on the way. Even if I settled for a minimal scope, I am never satisfied with my models or the execution. Instead of continuing, I learned Blender and got distracted on the way or search for ways to make my implementations better. This time, I created something worthy that I can call a game and released it.

- The Theme was broad the ideas flow! I got up at 3 o’clock in the night (by myself, because I was so excited) and I just had my idea more or less from the beginning. I started setting up the project in unity and GitHub and set up basics I though I need anyway like a simple UI, Main Menue and an Audio Manager.

- Learned “Spriter” on the way! During development, I learned a new tool that I acquired in a Humblebundle package a long time ago but never used so far. It’s pretty powerful but has its problems. A game jam is probably not the perfect place to learn a new tool, but the issues started implementing the assets into the engine, creating them was easy.

- My cheap drawing tablet from eBay is incredible! I got this Wacom tablet from eBay a couple of weeks ago, and I just used it a little to improve my terrible drawing skills. It was very convenient for this LudumDare as you can create pretty decent looking assets pretty fast.

THE BAD

- Features that did not find good use I wanted to create a game where a plant grows, and you have to defend it while taking care of it. I implemented the plant growing feature and an indicator that the soil around the plant changes colour according to if the plant needed water or sun. Unfortunately, I never had appropriate assets for the plant growth and the earth changing colour was too saddle to be recognised.

- Assets not implemented I created my different assets, animations, plant stages etc. in one batch. After implementing them into the engine, I noticed some problems and had to touch every asset again. It took 12 hours (!!!) to fix the adult plant that it plays the animations and that it looks alright in the game. In the end, I had even plant states (like a little sunflower) I could not implement anymore as they did not fit with the design of the current sunflower.

- One class fits all I wrote most of the code inside one script. The Game Manager. This was fine for the Jam, but as I touch the code afterwards again, it’s very complicated to change things. I guess its good practice to create at least one new script for every feature.

- Too embarrassed for the music I recorded some simple music for the game I never implemented. As I don’t play any instrument, I sang a melody into the microphone that I thought fit the dancing sunflower. But I was too embarrassed and discarded it and went without music instead. But after getting to know “VillageQuake” doing exactly that, I regret never putting it in. (That’s your fault @kontroman)

- Fly came too late After everything seemed so smoothly on the first day, I took my time to implement the enemy. If I would have known that the sunflower growing made so many problems, I should have implemented it right away as its one of the core elements. Not the growing sunflower part. Now the enemy is facing the wrong direction when coming from the right side and I had not the time to fix it.

THE LEARNINGS

- Why not prepare I want to be part of the LD47 in October, but then I want to have updated all the programs and created a GitHub repo before the COMPO starts (I guess it is allowed isn’t it?)

- Better use of existing elements I noticed a lot of games utilising their game elements better. Introducing them one by one and using them over and over again. I want to make use of that more and not waste time with features nobody notices and does not provide any use in the game (Soil)

- Talk about Ideas It helped me a lot discussing my game ideas with fellow LD participants as well as friends. Even if I wound at least five copies of pretty much the same game as I made it helps to focus on the crucial parts.

- Join a live community with people who can help you I found myself stuck with pretty easy coding problems from time to time, and it would have been great if there was a Discord or something with other people that could help me on short notice. Next time I want to find such a place before the LD starts!

WHATS NEXT

- Feedback received! I loved getting all the feedback for the game to see what other people think. I went on and worked a little on the game and implemented nearly everything requested and noticed that some ideas work, and others sound good and logical, but don’t work. I observe my comment section carefully and work to a second version of the game after the LD46 results have been published.

- Implement the missing features/assets I want to “Finish” the game with the vision I originally had. That means implementing a few new features and assets and adapting it for a new platform (mobile)

- iOS / Android app As I mentioned in the beginning, I am trying to create a game I can release on the Appstore. It’s mainly to say that I have an app ;) but as my development on my original project stalled, I decided to push this project to the limit and hope that Apple let me release it. I will post it here if I manage to do it!

PS: Thanks to @lectvs for his postmortem, as inspiration for mine, and I hope it was okay that I adapted your template :)