Frog Math Postmortem

These past two weeks, I made an arithmetic puzzle game. I used Love2d because the Love jam is coming up soon.

What went well:

I looked into the Love.js export process ahead of time, so I was able to upload something this time.

I think the art also turned out well, surprisingly? In the past I've tended to use premade assets or crappy programmer art, with the handwavey justification that I'll just replace everything later. This time I challenged myself to try and make a decent-looking game using only sprites drawn by myself. My art skills aren't quite there, but picking a color palette ahead of time helped a lot, although the fonts are doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

What went poorly:

The elephant in the room, time management. I said I would post a game every week three weeks ago, but didn't post anything last week. Basically, I was originally planning to make this game in Defold, but halfway through decided I would rather use Love, but by then it was already the last day before the deadline so I just extended it by a week.

The gameplay is also weak. Since I managed my time poorly and also wasn't totally sure what features to prioritize during development, I didn't have a prototype working until the day before the final deadline. As such I had pretty much no time to test or iterate, so what I uploaded is a first draft. The game's complexity is super frontloaded - the first thing the player wants to do is determine the values of the hidden tiles, so they immediately have four options off the bat (check key, check column sums, see if swapping affects column sums, move all mystery tiles to a single row), which is like, way too much. Really addictive games, from my observations, tend to only give the player one or two simple actions at a time to ease them in. The gameplay also ends up being a little shallow - once you determine the hidden tiles it's just rote, somewhat tedious addition, and if you can get two rows to add up to the correct sum, you'll probably also win the third on accident.

Goals for next time

    1. Finish within the 3-day time limit.

    2. Have a working prototype by the end of day 1.

    3. Make something light and easy to play.

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I'm fairly proud of this game, overall! The quality is debatable, but it's still heads and shoulders above anything I've completed before.