Seven Orbs of Life Postmortem

What went right?

Week six, game six. What can I say? I finally tackled the platformer...and completed it as best I could, as in, it’s playable, so that went right. I felt good about the particle systems used when enemies were killed, and about the (VERY) simple enemy AI. I also learned about Rule Tiles and how to animate tiles in the TileMap. Other than that, I don’t really like what I made this week...

What went wrong?

Well, for starters, I spent the first two days trying to implement a shader I wrote. The issue was, I barely had a concept for what I was going to do outside of “platformer” with a theme centered around memories. I wrote a fun shader awhile back for Ludum Dare 43 that would dissolve enemies that were hit by the player’s weapon and I thought I could use it for environment art in this game. With some changes to the shader, I had this:

Basically the level would disappear behind you, and you couldn’t go back once it had “been forgotten”. I liked the concept, but I spent too much time trying to get it to work with a TileMap. The way it's implemented above is on each sprite, but TileMaps work in a very different way. I’m ashamed to say I’ve only used the TileMap to throw out a game’s environment and use it’s colliders, and that’s the extent of my knowledge of it (until this week). TileMaps seems to go so much deeper and I’ve made a note to dive into it more in the future. Ultimately I spent too much time trying to be clever and not enough time making anything useful.

Normally with 7 days to complete a game I like to have a game playable in the first 2 to 3 days, which would give me time to test it and also do other real life stuff for the rest of the week, but this is was the bed I made for this week’s game and I needed to jam to finish it. Unfortunately, like last week’s life that got in the way (dead computer and broken water heater), this week wasn’t much different. I had to keep my youngest home from school because she had pink eye and unlike other parents who send their kids to school contagious with flues and pink eyes, I like to think it’s a jerk move to get other people’s kids sick. That was on day 2 and 3, scrambling to get something playable and fielding about 100 questions a minute about everything she could think of. On day 4 she was back to school and I sat down determined to have something that resembled a game by the end of the day. But life had other plans and the Air Conditioning unit that I had installed 4 year ago stop working. In Texas. I mean, I could go on and on about how unlucky I am, or give excuses about why this game is, in my mind, a piece of junk, but honestly it goes back to day 1. With 5 games down in 5 weeks, maybe I got a little complacent. And I was being foolish by not cutting the shader concept sooner and just making a simple level that worked. In the end, not a great game and not a great week, but I'm determined to learn a thing or two from it and move forward.