Lighthouse Keeper Postmortem: things learned & late bugs

This Ludum Dare was intense. I learned many things (well, not an extreme amount of things, this is not my first game jam, but still).

Known bugs:

• The spiky ball doesn't show up. You can only see it on the screenshots (and if you launch the Godot project from Github).
• The score is broken. It only goes up thanks to the rare powerups dropped by enemies. Same thing, on screenshots you can see all the +100, +2000, etc. that are not showing up in the released compo version.

Not bugs but still criticized:

• Items are too rare. Maybe this lack of reward is amplified because of the broken score.
• The beginning can be easy/boring. This is the case for many of my other games.
• Lighthouse special attack is a lot of fun but the player can't play with it too much.
• The lighthouse can get in the way.

And finally, good points:

• I've got excellent feedback on the music. This is thanks to my previous jam games, where in Snail Ragnarök I had a similar music for level 2, and in True Light I set up a cutscene in sync with the music. So this was very helpful.
• Hand-drawn graphics. This starts being my signature in game jams.
• The storytelling. I was worried I did a bit too much of it for such a small game, but people were happy about it.
• The "lighthouse bullet enhancement" mechanic.

To be fair, at the beginning of game development, when you shot in the lighthouse, it restored a little health. You could spam healing just fast enough to counter the enemy waves. Next I removed this effect. The second morning I added a boost on the bullet (current mechanic). After first release I made the lighthouse a little hurt to prevent attack spam & camping behind it.

Here is a fun thing about game ideas.

Hours before theme announcement, I made up a quick list of game ideas per theme, based on an advice I saw on a post. I quickly put about two ideas per theme. Except for Ruins/Fragile/Decay/Keep it alive, where I combined them into 4 game ideas. I didn't think one of those themes could make it. My favorite was "Outdated Technology".

The closest game idea to "Keep it Alive" I noted was "Astronaut on the terminator of the moon. Solar-dependent equipment. You must walk". It would be a platformer where you needed to stay in the light.

Next I woke up early in the morning (4-5 hours after theme announcement), and this idea was dropped. I brainstormed a few minutes, plugged in my graphics tablet, and drew a lighthouse (this is still the final sprite, except for some added shading). Everything else comes from this.

The good thing with rough hand-drawn art style is that you don't have to distinguish final graphics from placeholder ones. As long as you have a graphics tablet (or a good mouse, which I had for Snail Ragnarök).

So that's it for the fun thing about game ideas.

The thank-you stuff:

• I'd like to thank the 30-something testers for rating my game, and the 20-something compo games I've played & rated so far. If your game is not on the web or Linux I will not play it.
• Thanks a lot to Godot Engine developers. That's so easy to add juice, animations and effects to a Godot game it almost feels like cheating.
• Thank you for playing this game or just reading this!
• Very helpful stuff also includes the AAP-MajestyXVII palette. You can find it on Lospec. I didn't use the greens in game. I slightly tweaked it because I like to work with 12-bit colors (easier to remember 3 hexadecimal digits than 6).