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June 18, 2012

LD #23 Tiny Ranger Postmortem

After our first Ludum Dare (#23 Theme: Tiny World), we are really satisfied with the feeling. It was a great experience and we enjoyed (in some weird ways) developing under a great time pressure.


Tiny Ranger Screenshot

We had a lot of errors and problems related with our lack of experience in the beginning of the compo, next time we will face them totally aware.
Also, a new team mate joined us. He had no previous game development experience, so we spent quite a lot of time explaining the basics. Good thing is he adapted really fast and gave us some interesting points of view through the dev process.
Eitherway LD has brought us some interesting game ideas that we hope to develop further in a less stressful way, hehe.

What went wrong:

- The whole thing was awfully planned, as none of the team members could spend the whole weekend working in the game, due to previous unavoidable plans. We hope it will be perfectly scheduled next time we enter the LD.
- We should have prototyped everything better. The idea was not polished when we started coding, so we had to develop it while being implemented.
- We were too optimistic about what we could achieve, a lot of features and ideas had to be discarded in the end.
- our development tools were not totally ready and we spent 3 hours trying to install them in an old computer wich kept continuously crashing.
- Had some problems with the algorithms/bugs, must review some math before start coding.
- The aesthetics were not totally consensuated by the team, so some artwork was rejected at the end.
- We should have focused a bit more in the gameplay, it lacks fun and variety.
- Lack of social connections. (twitter, forums, comments…)
- Too much stress and anxiety. We have to learn to take it easy in these situations.
- The lack of planning lead to a slow production process in artwork, which could have used some improvements.

What went right:

- The final result is quite good for all the things that went wrong.
- We finished all the main features in time.
- Recorded a time-lapse!
- SFX implementation was really fast.
- Learned a lot from mistakes.
- Our lead artist finally managed to get involved with the code. That didn’t make a real contribution to the final result, but we think it can be a start point for future contributions to coding.
- We are thinking to give Tiny Ranger a chance to become a commercial product.
- We are very happy about the outcome of the dare. We did not expect that we could achieve such a good looking result when working under pressure.
- Our designers have found it really fun to work without creative limits, with the exception of the main theme “Tiny planet”, which is more an inspiration source than a limitation to the productive process.

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