So the game rating portion of Ludum Dare is over and Fan The Flames had 54 people rate it, with a total of 76 downloads. While it would of been nice to land in the Top 100. I knew from the feedback I was getting this wasn’t a reality. The scope of this project was rather large and ambitious for a solo developer to pull off within 48 hours. My game lacked a proper tutorial or at least teaching aspects, and the controls were convoluted. These are the two primary areas I’d improve on if I was starting LD45 today. The main game-play loop was accomplished rather quickly, but I spent too much time trying to perfect a day night cycle. I should have included more crafting recipes and controlled the snowfall better. Minor annoyances such as repetitive jumping sound, poor collision detection, and a non intuitive workbench left players frustrated. Overall, I’m happy with the direction of the art, I was able to produces those sprites rather quickly and using a cohesive color palette really added to the mood which is my second highest ranking result. The audio rating is pretty funny, as its all procedural generated sounds.
The other area of improvement I needed was a pixel perfect camera, some users reported seeing lines between the tile sprites, which I didn’t experience. However, I bet on a 16:9 screen this was a problem. Overall a solid entry and I’m looking forward to crushing these scores in April when LD46 comes around.
Cheers,
Corey