{"author_name": "TheMonsterFromTheDeep", "cat": "LD #31", "comments": [], "epoch": 1418172480, "likes": 1, "metadata": {"p_key": "22252", "p_author": "TheMonsterFromTheDeep", "p_authorkey": "45764", "p_urlkey": "57619", "p_title": "Post-compo thoughts", "p_cat": "LD #31", "p_event": "LD31", "p_time": "1418172480", "p_likes": "1", "p_comments": "0", "p_status": "UPD5", "us_key": "45764", "us_name": "TheMonsterFromTheDeep", "us_username": "/author/themonsterfromthedeep/", "event_start": "1417737600", "event_key": "26", "event_name": "LD31"}, "text": "

There is a lot that went right, but even more that went wrong with my game, Peaceful Night.

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\"PeacefulNightScreenshot\"

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The first thing that greatly affected my game was the genre, which is pretty obvious. I chose to make a 2D sandbox game, and although I did an OK job, it was simply too ambitious, especially considering that I had never done a few of the things I had to do (such as play audio loops).

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The second thing was my extremely dumb decision to make it so that the game screen never is drawn larger than the default resolution. I was probably tired and not thinking straight, and then I didn’t really think about resizing afterwards. This resolution issue caused two problems:
\n 1) It was not very fun and hard to play.

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2) Resizing the window causes lots of lag.

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Speaking of dumb decisions, although I am a novice graphics programmer and don’t really quite understanding how painting the screen works and stuff, I can say with some certainty that it’s a bad idea to force the screen to repaint every 10 ms. I’m also pretty sure that basically nullifies any reason to use a buffer for the graphics.

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There were also a few other things I shouldn’t have done, such as prioritize higher-memory processes over lower-memory processes.

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I also don’t really know the best way to do game loops in Java, so I hoped that using timers would be good enough.

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Finally, because this idea was so ambitious, and I couldn’t implement any enemies, there is basically nothing to do other than try to figure out what the crafting recipes are.

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Now, the one good thing is that I managed to make a walkcycle that doesn’t look terrible. I normally can’t do that.

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Overall, I’m pretty happy with my game. Although it didn’t turn out too well, I think it was OK for 48 hours, considering that I had never programmed some of the things in it before (such as an inventory GUI).

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If you haven’t played and voted, I would love it if you did, even if you rate it 1 star!

", "time": "December 9th, 2014 7:48 pm", "title": "Post-compo thoughts"}