Crystal Games Challenge Afterthoughts
A few quick notes about what I learned, what I am proud of, what could have been done differently, and general thoughts about our game now that the gamejam is over.
One thing we learned very early is to never start with something you aren't sure you can handle; with only 28 hours to make a game, you probably can't.
Specifically, we originally wanted to use Pony rigs and skeletal animation. We tried to export the Double Rainboom rigs to Spine, and then use the LÖVE plugin for that. But as it turns out, actually making good rigs is not very easy, to say the least. :V
This is why we went for a pixelated look instead, using Urimas' sprites and editing them to our needs. Our original plan might have been more effective and better looking, but it would take us ages to do it properly, which you just don't have during a game jam.
However, I'm still glad we tried it, even if it did cost us two hours of work; we learned a lot about how Spine works, and how to do rigs in general, even if we couldn't do it for this game.
On a more direct programing level, I've learned that LÖVE's love.graphics.scale function is really useful; it makes it very easy to work on a small game window and scale everything up very easily afterwards, without having to fiddle with all the scaling dimensions myself. Other than that, I pretty much only used stuff I was properly familiar with, so I didn't learn anything spectacular. It did however reinforce my love for ternary operators; that shit is just awesome when programming, and I love the way Lua implements it.
I must admit, I'm quite proud with how the gameplay for Quickspell turned out. It's quite fun to play a few quick rounds with someone, once you've both learned how to handle the controls properly.
And I have to say, it was a blast working together with Amadiro on this project, and I doubt I could have gone through with this on my own. It definitely helps to have someone to juggle ideas with, and it also helps with motivation towards finishing the work.
If I had more time, I'd like to balance out the game some more. I'm sure the timers/speedup/shots/etc could have been tweaked to be better. Another thing I'd improve is the UI graphics. The countdown numbers, magic bar, winning animation and standard font could all have been a fair bit better. But they had lower priority than the bg and character animations, so they had to remain crappy =/
Lastly, I'd also like to add a how to play section in the main menu. But that would have taken more time than it would have been worth, so it had to remain in an external textfile. I'll definitely edit it in if I make an updated version though.
All in all, I'm quite happy with how it turned out, and would love to participate in something like this again.
Edit: Amadiro wants me to add that I've learned that I have a horrible git discipline, and that I don't commit nearly enough... one day I'll learn these things.
