Header image
banana4life

Disconnect - Post-Mortem

posted by bananafourlife | 02 December 2014

Hey fellow gamedevs,

We are a team of four german students. We name ourselfs “Banana4Life” and have developed the game “Disconnect” for the second ludum dare we took part in. I (Jonas) made a quick LetsPlay of it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-To3KiIhNrA

You can rate and play our game here: Disconnect

But now lets get to the post-mortem. We didn’t have huge problems this time, after we spend half of the time developing a game that we threw away and started over last time. But lets start with what went right.

What went right?

  • The game was playable and apparently fun to play.
  • We had a cool idea from the start up and didn’t change it later on.
  • The graphics and music / sounds were developed steadily parallel to the code and thus weren’t a product of the last minute.
  • We implemented our core gameplay first and after that improved upon it.
  • We partly had a lot of features that we wanted to implement, but we cut the right features.
  • We slept a reasonable amount of time and weren’t completely destroyed after the weekend.

As you see the most important parts went right and I think we did a pretty good job developing the game this time. But we had some small problems anyway.

What went wrong?

  • We spent a lot of time working on collision detecting fixing it over and over but it never really worked.
  • At the end time ran out and the one level we had is pretty short.
  • One of our developers worked remote and wasn’t in one room with the other people which made communication harder.
  • Not all of us could work on the game on the third day, because they had to go to work.
  • The rendering of the walls could have been solved better.
  • Again the collisions were really annoying. Especially with syncing the player positions.
  • We didn’t play enough games

Most of the “What went wrong?” stuff could be solved with more time and maybe some more structured code on my side rendering the walls. (But it worked anyway)

What we want to do better?

  • Meet up all in one location
  • Maybe implement a little framework for the collisions or use an existing framework, because that would be a huge timesaver.
  • Take a day off the next day so everybody can work on the game the whole time.
  • Think a bit more before writing code. (maybe, maybe not)
  • Play more games

So I think we have an action plan for the next time.

  1. Prep a bit more by chosing a physics framework or something like this
  2. Try long enough to come up with a good idea. (Like we did this time)
  3. Make the game.
  4. Play more games.
  5. Enjoy the internet fame.

I hoped you liked our short writeup. Greetings,

Team Banana4Life

P.S.: Play and rate our game please.