What’s up gamer’s? I haven’t used this blog in forever, but now that the results for Ludum Dare are in, I figured I’d write a post-mortem on my project for it.
Now, since the release of AGHR, Anim Ace has expanded to several more artists, musicians (most of whom are +TEK’s friends), and a few other people to help with testing and design. When the theme for the ludum dare came in, or at least the final rounds of the themes, I asked people for suggestions, but i didn’t feel any of them were a combination of being both fun to play, unique, and easy to make. Eventually I came up with the idea of a tokusatsu hero fighting plaque with a toothbrush, and that’s when everyone got to work on it.
Now, I have been working on another project since finishing AGHR, and if you’ve followed this blog long enough you probably know what it is, but basically my plan was to take the technology/code from that and reuse it in Fluorider. Thankfully, the transition was pretty smooth, however there was a lot of work with retrofitting the technology to work in a smaller resolution. I think doing this was also really good, because it helped me find game-breaking bugs in my code that I would not have found otherwise.
The game ended up coming out kinda jank, but I guess that is to be expected with any ludum dare game. I considered at times going back to fix some issues, but I figured it ultimately was not worth doing so after the ludum dare jam ended, as it would have been cheating. There are still some annoying issues that bother me, but I have them fixed in my main project now.
I’m very glad people enjoyed this game. I kinda used it as a way to test market the controls/combat for my next project to see if people liked it, and I don’t think I’ve shown this to a single person to have them dislike it. However, this project made me realize something. As the only programmer in a team of now four artists and four soundmakers/testers, I felt very alone. As such, after this game, I brought on two more programmers (general purpose and to help with multi-sprite rigging) to help keep me company, even though I could still do those jobs myself.
I’m very glad we got such a high ranking, even though I saw a lot of other people get better rankings in the jam. I honestly expected us to be within the top 150 or so, so I can’t really complain. But I feel if I may have pushed my game a bit more and maybe fixed some things, we could have even gotten into the top 100.
As for if this is going to evolve into something more like AGHR did? Like I said, the code and combat used here is going to be used in another project of mine, and if you’ve followed this blog enough you probably know what it is, so be on the lookout for that!
