(Repost from old tumblr)
It’s done!
About Monsters is my first game alone (I participated in LD27 with friends). This experience was extremely rewarding. I learned a lot about games and tools. I confess that at times I doubted that I could finish. But I was wrong. Hope you enjoy the result. Thanks to everyone who attended the event, which influenced positively throughout the process.
You can play the game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=29062
(If you want to skip all this and just play the game, click here ;)
The Dare started well for us. We had a larger team, everyone had fairly clearly defined roles in the group, and the theme was something we’d actually voted for. It took us a couple hours of spirited discussion to land on anything solid as far as gameplay, but once we arrived at the idea we were all pretty happy about it.
Everything was going smoothly until the third and final day of the compo, when Rusty’s enemy AI began to fall apart. First attacking one enemy would kill every enemy in level, then some enemies wouldn’t die, then some enemies would appear to die, but their fallen corpse would still slide along the ground after you and kill you when it got in range. Unable to find the exact cause of the immortality bug, Rusty just threw a bunch more programming at it, solving the bug at the cost of several smaller bugs and a lot of wasted time.
We ended up having to drop most of the tileset, the enemy variations, the second and third levels and even the main goal of the game. Originally each level was going to have a scroll which would reveal your assassination target when picked up. The target would be randomly chosen at the point that you picked up the scroll, and when the target was killed the exit would appear and the player could make their way out of the level. If the player took longer then a minute several more enemies would spawn and all enemies would go into alert mode. Unfortunately we ended up having to scrap most of it due to time lost on the AI bugs, and in the final game the exit simply appears, when the scroll is picked up, and the level simply resets if the player takes longer than their minute. Which is actually only 45 seconds.
What we ended up with was a bit of a compromise on our original goals, but we still consider it a successful Dare. Most of the game jams we have been in we have been lucky enough to come away from with an acceptable alpha for a new game. This time I think what we have is more of a realllly rough prototype, but it still expresses a few fun gameplay ideas and we have a lot of thoughts on where to go with it from here.
As for why this postmortem took so long, well, Christmas :P Rusty (who usually maintains this blog) left for Alaska for the Holidays the day after the Dare ended, and with most of the team bloody busy for the next week or so, none of us noticed that his hurried postmortem (written during an overnight stay at the lovely SeaTac airport) had failed to post.. Oops!
