Splatter was an attempted to kinda of fuse Frogger and Plants vs Zombies Defense. You play as the cars, the villains of Frogger.

You can try out the result here http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=7406

This was my first game jam and it was a ton of fun. I picked the worst possible weekend to do it as I was graduating from college on Saturday  and I was not going to give up drinking with my friends and family and celebrating this weekend. As a result I was only able to work on this for about 9 hours. So I am quite happy with what happened with such little time.

What went right:

• The Idea, I believe, was good. I immediately wanted to do a classic game where you play as the villain  I toyed around with many different games as I had plenty of time to think about it before I could actually work on it. I eventually settled on this idea which I think has potential if fleshed out.
• The Distribution, I had alot of concern about whether I could compile for windows as I was programming in Ubuntu and using a library with separate natives. But it seems to work at least on Linux and Windows. One person has said it crashed after awhile of play but that may just be because I didn’t put in a kill screen it just closes. Thanks so much to JarSplice, you saved my ass.
• Finished, with my lack of time I was afraid that I wouldn’t have a finished product but I managed it, although it is not as fleshed out as I would have hoped.
• Persistence, (kinda goes with finished but whatever) There was a point where I thought it was over. I could not get slick to let me write text to the screen and I couldn’t find an alternative approach that didn’t use slick. I needed to display the score and points and costs and I didn’t see any options. Then I said to myself “NO! I’m going to finish this! I’m gonna make something. It doesn’t have to be the best. It just has to work and be mildly fun at least. After I encouraged myself I got the idea to draw the gold coins to represent cost and not worry about a score.

What went wrong:

• SLICK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Slick, the library, hated me. I could not get it to do anything right for me and the tutorials I found were all for depreciated methods and they wouldn’t work either. It cost me an hour or so looking at all the different tutorials and playing with it trying to get it to work.
• TIME, I graduated and partied most of the weekend and probably only spent a total of 9 hours on the project. That was not enough time, but I only graduate from college once and I wanted to spend it with all my friends and family. But It was also important to me to do this Jam, to prove to myself I can finish and make something in limited time.
• MAVEN, There really needs to be a good archetype for maven that uses lwjgl. The tutorial for using maven on their website was lacking and it did not automatically compile to a jar that would actually run. I lost lots of time learning how to do this manually.

Future:

• I really really really enjoyed doing a game jam and I think I am going to do as many of these as I can from now on. It will also help keep my programming skills up as I look for a programming job.
• I want to flesh out the game with graphics, sound and ACTUAL TEXT ON THE SCREEN DAMMIT. I joined the One Game A Month challenge so I think I will flesh this out and release a newer version for January’s game.
• I would like to learn how to make an Maven Archetype and design one for making LWJGL projects to help anyone that has had the same problems I have. Plus it would be yet another thing that would be good to learn.

In closing, Its been a really fun ride and I can not wait to do it again and really be able to put in all the time I could to make something exceptional next time.