Hey fellow gamedevs,

We are a team of four german students. We name ourselfs "Banana4Life" and have developed the game "Disconnect" for the second ludumdare we took part in. I (Jonas) made a quick LetsPlay of it on YouTube.

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If you do not know what ludumdare is, go visit their site. I think game jams are a cool way to develop ideas to prototypes.

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.

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)

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

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

I hoped you liked our short writeup and maybe even learned something.

Greetings,

Team Banana4Life

It's always a challenge to communicate as a team.

With two people writing code, making definitive choices can be hard. Remotely, right.

What language and tools were you using?

Hey Boder,

Yeah it was kind of hard to communicate remotely. Gladly we all know each other pretty well and thus don't really have big problems communicating in general. Especially with two and a half men working on the code discussing in person is really helpful.

We used Java with the libgdx framework which we used before in a university project. Libgdx has a lot of features, but is sometimes is a bit weird to use. As IDE we used IntelliJ. It is just great and solid. I love IntelliJ.

Version control was git with smartgit as graphical assistance. (Don't really need it, but smartgit is nice to have and super easy to use)

For the graphics I used graphics gale and a bit of photoshop for transparency tweaking and some other fancy effects. Further I had my graphicstablet as input device.

I think for the music we used garageband and maybe more? I don't really know.

Hope you have a nice day.