MiniLD#37 Postmortem

As anybody who read the previous blog post already knows, I entered the Mini-Ludum Dare #37 challenge. This had the not-a-game and real-time themes. My entry was Musatic, which was a rhythm game but with the twist that you create your own song and dance in real time. As the initial phase of creation was in real-time and the focus was on the creation of music/dance instead of the actual game, I feel that both themes were at least loosely met. Now that the challenge is finished and I have had time to reflect on it, this post will be my mini-postmortem.

What went Right

Choosing music for my theme seemed like a really risky thing when you consider how little I know about the subject. Still, I believe that the best way of learning something is by doing it so writing a game that revolves around music would at the minimum give me some working experience. My goal behind this project was to create something that someone who knows nothing about music could use to create a short song. The first step was to create notes. As Audacity has a pluck generator, a range of notes were created. I decided that the easiest way of handling music would be to have all the notes that make up the song the same length. This made editing and replaying the music much easier as I would only need a grid that indicated what notes to be played at what interval.

This lead to my first day of work being focused on the creation of the music editor. My original thought was this would be a cheat mode, but I wanted to have the editor functioning for testing. When it took far longer than I originally anticipated to get the editor to a functional state, I had thought that focusing on the editor was going to be a what went wrong entry, but as I started playing with the editor, I realized that it was kind of fun so upgraded the editor to a main-menu item.

What went Wrong

Yet again, I made the mistake of not having a library ready. As creating a game engine, even one for such a simple game, is time consuming, it would be wise to go into a game jam with an existing game engine. I've noticed that a number of participants use game creating tools such as Game Maker, but I would prefer to have my own engine. Something that handles all the basics of a game so that the 48 hours (less with sleep) can be focused on the game not on the plumbing of the game. Some people may point out that I am using the Starling framework, which could be considered a library. This really is not the case as Starling is more for giving Flash a 3D acceleration boost rather than adding new capabilities.

Speaking of Starling, using an unfamiliar framework would be my second mistake. While I had been playing around with Starling before starting on this project, I had not actually finished a project using it. As a result, there are a lot of things that I did not know about the framework so did not know what issues there were. I actually did run into an issue with the way I implemented the editor. I am not sure what exactly the problem was, but suspect that I simply had too many objects with listeners attached to them. Had I been more familiar with the framework, the approach I took towards creating the editor screen would have been different and the performance of the editor would probably have been much greater.

Going forward

I actually really enjoyed this project and learned a lot. It is a project that most certainly be expanded upon so is probably something that will be revisited if only to enhance the music editor so quick and dirty music scores can be created for future game jam projects. If I do decide to update the full game, I suspect that it would take the form of an AIR application so that it would be easy to save and play levels.