Rob:  the thief

It’s Nathan this time, I thought I should write something since Brad wrote and streamed everything else.

Summary

We didn’t have our sights set too high for the competition. I am in college and I just finished my final projects on the 13th after pulling a couple all nighters so I didn’t get much time to prepare. Our main goals were to come out with something playable. We also wanted to learn a lot about game dev in general and game dev with Java + Slick2d. We are happy to announce we accomplished those goals.

Brad and I have never really worked on a project together before and we are both first time Ludum Dare participants, it was a great experience for both of us on the collaboration aspect and the 72 hours without proper personal hygiene aspect.

Personally I had never worked on a single repository with the same person before, I was new to conflicts when merging so that was great to learn.

On a final note overall it was a great time, we generally completed our goals. We were hoping to finish  something with more substance, such has sound in the game, a bigger map with more obstacles, enemies, etc, but we are happy with the result.
All we have up right now is the source, however we will soon be adding a jar and hopefully an applet.

What went wrong

•  Not enough time was spent preparing before the competition started.
•  We should have familiarized ourselves with the Slick2d Library more before starting
•  Got less completed than we hoped
•  Did not get to implement sound into the game

What went right

•  We learned more than we originally thought we would
•  We got a rough prototype completed
•  We were able to stream the process, and take snapshots for a time-lapse video (coming soon)
•  Built a lot of reusable component based entity classes

What’s next

• Build more from the prototype, add more of a level, change the art, add sound, etc.
• Refactor and fix the bugs that exist currently due to the shortcuts we had to take to finish on time.