So with 4 hours remaining and an estimated 8 to 12 hours of coding to get something worthy of submission, I am out.  Here’s my postmortem.

1.) Totally lost interest on Saturday, which caused me to be a day behind.  I got frustrated with trying to create the art for the game.  Didn’t regain interest until Sunday afternoon.  So a good 10 to 12 hours lost.

2.) Trying to create art before game play.  I think a big mistake is getting caught up in the frustration of trying to create art for the game before working out the game play.

3.) Know your tools!  So I keep jumping from one set of tools to the other.  My first LD, I used AS with Flixel.  I believe the last LD, I was using Java with LWJGL.  This time I used AS with FlashPunk.  Though I didn’t have much trouble with FlashPunk, I got caught up in trying to create elaborate code for things that were much simply handled by the library.

4.) Scale back features.  I don’t think this was a big problem for me this time, however, looking at what I had to complete – a scoreboard, A* Pathfinding, a tiling system, and intro and end screens, and various other tweaks, I didn’t have enough time.  These things were important to the game itself.

5.) Quite proud of these.  First, after my initial frustration with art – I finally came up with some things that I liked.  I implemented a timer based spawner, where the number of spawns were directly proportional to game elapsed time.  I had a little trouble with how collisions should be implemented but finally figured that out.

For next LD
1.) Prototype gameplay with basic rects.

2.) Find a graphic artist and/or sound designer to pair up with for graphics and sound/music.

3.) Implement a level system.

I believe that I will finish this game and post it to my website later in the week.