Ludum Dare 32 Post-Mortem

So I have never written a post-mortem before. The theme for LD32 was "An Unconventional Weapon". I had a few ideas and I was down to 2 major concepts and was particularly excited about the one I didn't choose. In the end, I went with an idea for a tower defense game where you can turn your enemies into towers.

Spaced

Spaced is a top-down tower defense shooter where you turn your enemies into towers. You play as a stranded astronaut lost on an alien planet with no memory. Game play consists of a top-down shooting system where you fight off waves of enemies and protect your land rover. You have an alternate special fire that you can use to kill special enemies and turn them into totems, which you can then spend to place towers. (tower defense style)

Game play

The player is the cyan dot (bottom-left). Dots with a translucent aura are towers. Other dots are baddies. The baddies are trying to get to the rover at the top of the image.

The Good

People liked my audio. It was my highest rated piece. I used a music generator and mostly SFXR,  for some more sci-fi-ish sound generation. While the music was generating I would add complexity to parts I wanted (more high/low notes) to oversee and make sure it was more towards what I wanted. It made a pretty cool atmosphere.

My second highest was innovation, so that's good. Honestly, I didn't think the idea behind my game was all that innovative, but it seems like many compers use one of the first few ideas they had. Innovation was the second highest on my last submission as well, so Innovation might actually be one of my strong suits, which would be a pretty awesome strong suit to have. :3

The Bad

I tend to focus on the bad, but the bad is just a place where you can improve.

My game was really difficult. This has been an issue for me from the dawn of time. I usually cannot get a grasp on difficulty for some reason, not sure why, but my number one complaint was that my game was hard. I let a few of my friends play-test the game and 2 of them had an easy time, while 2 of them had a hard time. I'm not really certain how to tackle this concept. Many of the LD games seem to do stuff like, make the game last until you lose, so the challenge comes in time and you are eventually over whelmed and your skill level just determines how long you last, but some submissions do seem to have alternative ways of having challenge and they work it out well.

I also believe that conveyance was a huge place where I can improve. I had originally planned to have a narrative that would occur between every mission that would help to explain some of the mechanics and bring some questions to the player that they would want to finish the next section of the story to answer, but the narrative was dropped for time reasons. I had also wanted to work on a real UI instead of the text based UI that is currently there. I think that if I had a UI, that would show which button to press anytime you have at least one tower to put down, then it would have conveyed a large piece of the games mechanics to the player. A lot of people that played, did not even understand the game's core mechanic until half way through the second level. Also, each tower had a special thing that it would do that was intended for the player to figure out, but most people just felt it was confusing. Next time I think I will add a short tutorial beforehand and not rely so heavily on something that may not get into the game in the end.

Art for the Narrative that didn't make it in.
 I wasn't even excited about this idea until day 2 when I came up with a story.

Controls where also clunky. Playing on a Xinput, I had a twin stick shooter, but you had to press RTrigger or LTrigger to fire while also moving with the left stick and aiming with the right stick. It didn't work out so well. One of the totems required you to aim with the right stick and place it with the blue 'X' button, which was very hard. I also, left out keyboard and mouse controls, so many players couldn't play it at first. I later added them in, and they proved to be much easier to use than the X-input controller. Oh, and also, placing totems on the X-Input controller was based on the color of the buttons. So the Y button (which is yellow) would place the yellow totem, a lot of people didn't get this.

Conclusion

Overall I got in the 45th percentile. Not too shabby. Last submission I got in the 59th percentile, so I cannot say I am too satisfied with myself. In this LD I went with an idea that was fairly simple, had a little innovation, but mostly, was easy to polish do to the conventions it contained. During the pre_Ludum Dare hype, I had watched the shadow keynote from the button masher bros and they said that a good submission was functional, and polished. In my early brainstorming step, I came up with about 11 ideas, and later refined it to 2 choices, one being the one I used and the other being a more creative idea that I was excited about, but not entirely sure how I would execute. So, this LD I went for functional and polished over innovative. I really think I should have trusted my personal design sense and stuck with my normal creative process. Innovative & working is, in my opinion better than functional and polished. Next LD, I think I will go with the more innovative idea, especially if it is the one that I am most excited about.  I also succeeded in my personal challenge to not make a 2D platformer. Next time however, I don't think I will put such restrictions on myself unless I really notice a pattern forming.

All-in-all it was a great LD and I learned a lot and that is what's most important. :3

You can try out my submission Here.