I had a blast with this Ludum Dare, mainly because my tools were in such good shape.  All the work I had done on my libraries beforehand let me focus on content creation for the most part.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=5649

What went right:

Helper classes – I made a bunch of helpers before the compo to automagically handle sounds and particles and static objects in the map.  Saved tons of time.

Update entities – Really saved the day.  Allows you to change entity objects in the map without rebuilding.

Acoustic guitar for music.  I couldn’t remember how to play, but just tried random stuff and fixed it all in audacity

What went wrong:

On map building I only had one major mistake, and that was losing an hour or two to leaks and map errors on the third level attempting to create a windy branchy maze by duplicating and rotating.  Brush maps tend to break when you do that.

I also had a bug where a switchable light set to on wouldn’t be on if you built the map with update entities.  I chased that one for awhile.

Sleeping in small chunks.  Didn’t really work that well.  I usually set the alarm for 4 hours, but only once was actually awakened by it.  Usually I just woke up on my own and got back to work.  I’d always awaken feeling refreshed, but I’d be tired again after just a few hours.

My “full build” button doesn’t actually save the final product.  You have to “Save Zone” after.  Several times I forgot, and couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

My alpha sorting broke!  I was so mad.  I spent a lot of time on that and even tested it in my warmup!

Story – I might have left too much unexplained.  Is the apprentice the lover?  Is the prisoner a man or a woman?  What happens at the end?  Also if the power is out, how did the first door and the elevator work?  Also if you don’t hit the triggers in the right order it can tell you stuff you already figured out, or reference stuff you might not have seen if you missed picking something up or hitting a journal trigger.

Stuff I want for next time:

I’m planning on making a game specific entity class creation tool.  This would allow you to specify what fields and default values an entity would have in a gui, then at the press of a button it would automagically edit quark’s entity file, and maybe even generate some C# code as well.

Pathfinding – I have some basic A* code but it isn’t integrated with anything.

Terrain integration, working on this in another project.  BModel style mini bsps for landscape objects like rocks or ruin chunks, or full buildings with portals that look out and in.

Doom3 style gui screen surfaces.  These would be great for making interesting puzzles.

Tags: ld25, postmortem, xna