Make Tetrominoes!<\/a><\/em>, doesn’t fit the theme all that well, it really needs some balancing, and due to other areas of my life being busy I was unable to get away from the JavaScript library\/engine I used last time, which doesn’t play well with Firefox and necessitates a soundless version. However, the game has been well received, it’s colorblind-friendly, it’s playable in a mobile browser (which wasn’t true of the last game I made with enchant.js), it’s pretty easy to figure out without reading anything even though I didn’t get a tutorial in like I wanted to, and since I’m a better coder now, I can easily extend the game — it will be easy to balance what I have and I believe it won’t take an inordinate amount of work to make the game playable by blind people.<\/p>\n In general, it’s clear to me that my coding skills have improved since last time. \ud83d\ude00 So now for a breakdown, bullet list style.<\/p>\n
<\/span><\/p>\n What went right<\/strong><\/p>\n \n - Make Tetrominoes!<\/em> was designed with accessibility in mind. Making it vision-impaired friendly wasn’t in the cards for the compo version, but the colorblind and the hearing-impaired can play the game without issue.<\/li>\n
- I took a systematic program design MOOC between LDs 27 and 28, and by using the methodology learned in it was able to program efficiently and with a minimum of bugs. It was ridiculous how much stress I eliminated by using systematic program design.<\/li>\n
- It uses mouse controls instead of keyboard, and enchant.js treats them as the same thing, so it’s playable on mobile this time. \ud83d\ude00<\/li>\n
- In LD 27, I learned that even though pretty code doesn’t matter\u00a0too<\/em> much in a game jam, sometimes you do need to refactor so that you have a clue what your code is doing. I remembered that lesson well and refactored at a critical point. I’m sure it saved me lots of heartache<\/li>\n
- Greater familiarity with Javascript made it very easy to leverage prototyping to my advantage.<\/li>\n
- I wrote the code with future extensions in mind. Not just for adding accessibility, but for things like changing the board size and number of colors of pieces and enabling 5-block tetrominoes as an option.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n
What went not-so-right<\/strong><\/p>\n ![\"Make](\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/make_tetrominoes_early-550x486.png\")
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\n - Although the game was designed with colorblindness in mind, my prototype graphics weren’t colorblind friendly. I was uploading builds for people to dink around with, and it turns out one of my friends is colorblind and couldn’t play until the final version of the game. Oops!<\/li>\n
- There was a lot of time spent not coding. I had a Skype call from my best friend shortly after I started coding. This lasted a few hours and did horrible things to my ability to concentrate on code, but he and I are separated by a distance of about a third of the Earth’s circumference, so I am okay with that. It was good to talk to him, but not so good for game progress. And I spent a lot of time cooking. I may have gotten a bit\u00a0too<\/em> gung-ho about eating well during Ludum Dare.<\/li>\n
- This is kinda a subpoint of point two, there, but I did not get a tutorial in like I wanted to.
![\":(\"](\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-includes\/images\/smilies\/frownie.png\")
<\/li>\n - I really like enchant.js, but the fact that having sound files in the game keeps it from even loading in Firefox is a problem. I need to learn a new engine\/library before April.<\/li>\n
- I’ve refactored and cleaned up the code quite a bit since submitting my game (and fixed a bug), but I still haven’t really documented things. That might come back to bite me in the rear later.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n \n
Tags: post-mortem<\/a>, postmortem<\/a><\/p>","time":"December 23rd, 2013 6:05 am","title":"Make Tetrominoes! Postmortem"}
![\"Make](\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/Screen-Shot-2013-12-16-at-11.32.34-AM-550x486.png\")
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