Borderline Post Mortem

My post jam work on Borderline is now complete and since I’m entered in the extra category I’m not waiting for ratings. So I wanted to write up a post mortem as my final wrap up for Ludum Dare 51. I do think it’s important to reflect on the good and bad of each project to try and take those lessons forward. So here we go.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Reasonable Scope & Ambition

I’ve been jamming for over 10 years now and at the start that went really well, with me aiming very small and being proud of what I did. As I got better as a game dev I got worse as a jammer, constantly setting myself ambitions I couldn’t reach and leaving a pile of unfinished jam games I pretended I’d find time to finish later. Over the past few years I’ve finally reached a good balance where I can scope out a game interesting enough that I think it’s worth making, but small enough to be completed in a few days.

I scoped the game to be in 2 rooms with what eventually became 2 interconnected puzzles. Knowing I could do something interesting at that scale but it would be manageable within the 3 days of the LD JAM timeframe. There were still some time management problems I’ll cover later but the game was the right size and it still had plenty of places I could cut scope as and when required.

Advance Preparation

I knew that working on the SNES was going to be challenging. It’s from the era where not only are the platform capabilities fairly limited but also to get the maximum they could at the time the way you talk to the hardware can sometimes be quite strange. The lack of a larger SNES homebrew scene despite the popularity of the machine should speak to this.

Thankfully the PVSNESLib C library and its plethora of samples helped overcome some of the biggest hurdles. I spent the evenings of the week before the jam getting a basic framework up and running of a character I was moving around a background. I’m glad I did because I ran into a ton of weird problems that made me almost reconsider the SNES for LD51. Despite those frustrations I had my simple framework by the time the theme was announced and felt like I could hit the ground running.

Healthy Working Habits

I don’t believe in the value of game dev crunch. I think coding exhausted produces worse work much slower. I’ve championed against it in places I’ve worked and I believe the same of game jams. I think it’s irresponsible that many student orientated game jams sometime joke about the expectation you’ll be doing all nighters. Look after yourself and make the best game you can without ruining yourself in the process.

For Ludum Dare 51 I slept well every night, I tried to eat good meals and not just junk food, and when I was feeling burnt out I took a break to watch some TV or played games to clear my head. I still worked long hard hours on the game but I don’t think you need to push yourself to breaking point to make a great game jam game.

Being EXTRA

I’m not a competitive person by nature, at least not with other people. I always strive to improve my own work, beat my own standards. Not based on how others judge my work, but on how I judge it myself. For that reason I was very happy when the extra category was added. I like the make my games and put them out but not then compete how well they stack up against other entrants.

However the lose rules around the EXTRA category also came with some other benefits. I’ll cover what went wrong in a moment but ultimately I had to deliver my game late and eventually had to subvert the core theme of the jam. The EXTRA category meant I could do these with no stress or pressure. I could make calls that were right for me and for the game without worrying about breaking competition rules.

WHAT WENT WRONG

Team 10 Seconds Backfire

I was originally against “Every 10 Seconds” as a theme when it seemed to be trending pre-competition. However since it was starting to look likely to get picked I pondered on it for a while and came up with an idea I liked. The player being transported between two different worlds constantly and having to solve puzzles between those two worlds. I built the whole game around this and experimented with how I could make this interesting.

Sadly once the game was finished it was very obvious that 10 seconds is just too short a time for an old school adventure game. Everything you do feels rushed and stressful and player feedback from the beta version I uploaded confirmed what I already felt. Post jam the first thing I did was change the timer to 30 seconds. It breaks with the theme of the event but it’s what the game needed to play better, so I had to do it.

A Difficult Platform

I hoped that by spending a load of time pre-jam preparing to work on the SNES it would make the jam itself run much smoother with me focusing more on the game than the platform. I’m ever the optimist but I was proved wrong time and time again throughout the weekend. So many different things broke in bizarre ways I could not have imagined. A huge chunk of Sunday was lost just to this kind of bug fixing.

One recurring issue really burned my time. If I’m going to make another SNES game I definitely need to write my own text renderer. The one built in to PVSNESLib kept behaving in weird and bizarre ways I never figured out, instead I just found ways to hack over to hide the mess. Although that was the biggest culprit there were many more strange bugs I never understood despite wasting hours on them. Working on old hardware is no joke and I’m glad I managed to finish the game regardless.

Holiday Time

I said at the end of LD50 that the biggest problem was not having the Monday off to finish up the jam, and that for LD51 I would absolutely take Monday off. Sadly it was too busy at work and once again I couldn’t get the Monday off. Even though my game was scoped nice for a 3 day jam I actually only really had 2 days. Working in the evenings I only found I could get a few hours done each night and so I didn’t release my game until Thursday. I got it done but it was sad to repeat the same mistake of LD50.

To many the answer would be to go for a smaller scope but tbh I’m happy with the path I chose. I got a scope that felt right and any smaller and I think I wouldn’t have been excited to make the game. Ideally in future jams I will have the Monday off and get the game done within the time frame. However it’s not the end of the world to take a few extra evenings to finish up.

CONCLUSION

I’m super happy with the results of Ludum Dare 51. I made a game for the Super Nintendo, a platform that was a super important part of my childhood. I’m proud of the game in that it achieved a lot of what I wanted it to do. I had a lot of fun with the jam and never found it too stressful or exhausting. I’m once again reminded what a great event and community Ludum Dare is and find myself inspired more than ever to keep making games.

My one last task is to get this game programmed onto a reproduction SNES circuit board.