Shadow Covenant

After almost a week after the competition, here’s the postmortem for “Particles”, my LD #26 entry…

What went right

• Again, my wife helped me with the brainstorming of a simple idea that was doable early on, which let me focus on developing soon, instead of just dicking around with some concepts
• Theme… Although I wasn’t a big fan of the theme this time, the fact remains that it restrained me a bit and I managed to pull a very complete game.
• Time for level design: this time, I budgeted and got to work about 3 hours or so in level design, which was great for the overall feel of the game, making for a more interesting and cohesive experience.
• Development plan: making a development plan early on really helped me keep the game on track… Although I could only “finalize” it later in the first day, it really gave me a good perspective on what I could achieve
• Focus on gameplay mechanics: I’m more of a story guy, but that usually lead to games that require a lot of content, which is kind of a no-no in 48-hour compos… This time, by focusing on the gameplay, I could fine tune the game and add the extras I wanted.
• Motivation: since I was seeing cool stuff happen on screen (and I did it fast), it started getting my creating juices going, which helped me keep me motivated for the 20+ hours it took me to actually develop this.

What went wrong

• Music: I usually use Wolfram Tones to build the music, but someone pointed out in a previous compo that their user agreement doesn’t allow to use it in this way, so I had to find another way to make music… But I don’t have any decent tools for it and I couldn’t find anything that really allowed me to create something fast that I could master easily… I tried out iNudge and some other stuff, but I ended up resorting to a friend of mine that’s a musician. He has all this gear so he was kind enough to teach me how to use it and leverage it to make at least one music for the game… although it took me 3 hours to get it right!
• Particle physics: It took me forever to fine-tune the particle behavior, since the standard “magnetic” equations weren’t making for a fun game, which is kind of more important than actual being physically correct… I ended up by having lots of small parameters to adjust and specialized code to handle some circumstances so that the game felt right without being right.

All in all, it was one of my best entries ever, and considering the feedback I’ve been having so far, it seems people are enjoying the game…

This is why I intend not only fixing some bugs reported, but also improve the graphics a bit (get rid of Comic Sans, for example!), besides adding levels and new mechanics to the game in the near future…

You can download the game here, and the source here. If you took part on the Ludum Dare 48-Hour competition, you can go here to vote for my entry.

If you’re too lazy to download and play stuff, you can always check the video below: