Back to life postmortem

What went right

Not much really, heh. It's submitted, it's playable and doesn't look too bad.

What went wrong

First of all, I wanted to create something simple this time that would take me about two weeks to complete. Obviously it didn't work. It took me  most of the month,  and I submitted the game about a day before deadline.

Much of this time was spent on presentation. Initially I wanted to give the grass more variety, but it ended up not looking good. I decided to draw it with simple checkboard pattern instead. It was easy to implement and looked pretty good. I should've implemented it this way right away. The next thing I spent much time on was light radius. I wanted to restrain the player from walking away from the spawn point, as this could ruin the challenge. I tried a few different options, but eventually thought the best option was to provide a light source fixed at the spawn point. This was done by alpha blending a vignette with grass and game sprites. Additionally I had to clip all drawing to the size of vignette image to make everything outside of it invisible.

Because of all this I didn't spend enough time to make game mechanics interesting enough. It turned out to be a typical fight-endless-horde-of-enemies type of game. There are also some annoying details. There's no attack cooldown timer, and the skeletons' range is clearly off. 

It ended up being rant-your-own-game type of post, but oh well.