Ludum Dare 43 Post-Mortem

I'm kinda jumping the gun on calling this a post-mortem since at the time of uploading this video, Ludum Dare 43 hasn't even finished yet. But hey, I already finished my submission and based on my schedule of uploading a video every 3 days, this is the best time slot to make this.

So for those of you who don't know, the theme was "Sacrifices must be made". I used a word processor to jot down a few ideas, and soon enough I came up with the idea that the player has to protect a small population of people from a bunch of oncoming enemies, but they can also sacrifice a member of the population to get stronger.

And that's the premise of my submission, you kinda have to balance having citizens to protect - if they all get killed or sacrificed, then the game's over - with your own power. Also, the enemies get progressively stronger as the game goes on.

So how did development go? Well, I originally intended for the art to be a bit more interested and varied than it ended up being, I thought hey I can do medium quality art in a relatively short time, so why not? However, by the time I put pixel to... uh... computer screen, I ended up with some real minimalistic sprites.

This proved to not really be an issue since it looks perfectly respectable, and on top of that took me like an hour to create.

As for code, there was a bunch of algorithmic type programming which is my absolute favourite type of programming. For instance, moving the selection cursor between citizens to determine which one to sacrifice was real fun to program, though I did spend about an hour working through one annoying bug which in retrospect, was way more time than I should have.

Another nice one was determining how the citizens should wander around- I went through a few really complicated solutions until the really simple "generate a random point to walk towards, then once they reach that point just generate a new one" system popped into my head.

Overall I'm really pleased with this Ludum Dare submission I gotta say, it's probably my best one yet in so far as its design goes. It's probably got the most replay value, and miraculously the music turned out sounding pretty decent! For the first time since that one music track from Mushroom: The Ruckus... I can't remember what it's called, but it was pretty good.

I also feel like in this Ludum Dare, I paced it way better- previously, I'd have like almost the whole game finished on Saturday, then on Sunday I'd only have audio and a few tweaks left to do. This time, it was much closer to a 50/50 split- probably on account of how much work I had to put into this one as compared to my previous Ludum Dare games. All in all, I put just under 16 hours of work into this Ludum Dare game.

Thanks for watching and stay tuned for more videos about games that I make, some of which are Ludum Dare games and others which are like real proper big games.