This postmortem covers my experience with the 10th Ludum Dare 48hour game competition, in which I won a Silver Pelly in the Technical category.

Summary

The theme for the competition ended up being 'Chain Reaction'. This wasn't really one of my favourites, in fact, it was amongst the themes that I wanted the least. I think my dislike towards the theme is pretty apparent in the final result, as it doesn't feature traditional "chain reactions" as seen in most of the entries. Taking that aside, the "game" (quotes because it's more of a toy) turned out pretty good I think.

As soon as I discovered the chosen theme I began the hunt for ideas, and just like most of the other entrants I tried hard to think in different directions than what had already been done (match3, boomshine). From the get-go I knew I wanted to do something in 3D, simply because I figured most entries (if not all) would be 2D. This was a silly decision, considering the gameplay I ended up with would have translated very well to a 2D setting, and would have saved me a bunch of time which could have been spent on polishing. But anyway, having it 3D allowed for a couple nifty little features.

It didn't take long for me to decide that I was going to use spring physics in some way or another. But knowing what a pain it is to implement and use springs, I knew the usage had to be something really simple. I honestly don't remember the idea I initially went for, but somewhere along the road, while implementing the physics, I discovered how fun it was to swing this snake-like structure around using the tail as a wrecking ball of sorts. With this discovery I figured I might as well do something with that.

There were lots of possibilities bundled with this discovery, like for example I could make it a fighting action game where you use your tail to bash down enemies, with possible chain customization included. Or, you could use your tail to collect stuff scattered around on the playing field. As said, lots of possibilities based around it simply being fun to control the motion of the tail.

I guess it's true that games are emergent.

Ultimately I ended up with a game about "snake-like creatures using their tails to bash a ball around a soccer field in hope of hitting the opponents goal" that had close to nothing to do with the initial idea. (Which I don't even recall what was by now - I guess it wasn't very good!)

What Went Right

I'm really happy about these, and they were really simple to implement!

I still find myself enjoying swinging them around, so these were a definite success.

The mouse control scheme is probably the one feeling most "right", and is quite easy to control, in my opinion. Same goes for the gamepad scheme.

What Went Wrong

This competition is generally not very friendly towards microsoftian technologies, thereby making distribution a living hell for anyone using them. I knew this beforehand, having participated before. I chose to use them regardless as I feel much more confident in the use of them which makes me able to produce stuff faster.

This was a bad decision, but I did not feel I had the time to figure out a decent AI solution for the enemy opponent. Even now there's no obvious solution that pops into my mind when thinking about it, so even though it was a crippling decision it was probably the right one.

Waste of time and effort. The springy goals are often not even noticed, and has zero impact on the game-play.

They suck. Nuff' said. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there's not really any way of having keyboard controls that feels right for this game.

Conclusion

It was a very good competition this time, and it went very well for me. I produced a whole lot of stuff during the competition, and ended up with a nice little multiplayer toy that I had some fun playing.

However, the game did not really make great use of the theme, and in a similar fashion did not present any new and awesome innovative game mechanics. Another downside is that I tend to end up with half-games; that is, games which lack polish (menus, game states, help screens/information) and are therefore basically just toys.

"Use the Tail, Luke!"