{"author_name":"Tsuk13","cat":"LD #25","comments":[{"author_name":"agmcleod","time":"December 18, 2012 9:28 am","epoch":1355840880,"text":"With slick, i&#8217;ve run into a lot of the same issues before. Libgdx seems to be better in that regard, but i sometimes still run into older stuff. Just need to keep an eye on the last updated date, and any notes if the article is deprecated.","spam":"N"},{"author_name":"eerongal","time":"December 18, 2012 9:37 am","epoch":1355841420,"text":"I would just like to say that I had issues getting slick to do what i wanted as well, though it could be my inexperience with it. i eventually got where i was going with it, but i think the BIGGEST issue is lack of good documentation for the API.","spam":"N"}],"epoch":1355839980,"likes":1,"metadata":{"p_key":"47507","p_author":"Tsuk13","p_authorkey":"7406","p_urlkey":"83172","p_title":"Splatter: A Post-Mortem","p_cat":"LD #25","p_event":"LD25","p_time":"1355839980","p_likes":"1","p_comments":"2","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"7406","us_name":"Tsuk13","us_username":"tsuk13","event_start":"1355443200","event_key":"14","event_name":"LD25"},"text":"<p>Splatter was an attempted to kinda of fuse Frogger and Plants vs Zombies Defense. You play as the cars, the\u00a0villains\u00a0of Frogger.<\/p>\n <p>You can try out the result here\u00a0http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-25\/?action=preview&amp;uid=7406<\/p>\n <p>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\u00a0Saturday\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n <p>What went right:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>The Idea, I\u00a0believe, was good. I immediately wanted to do a classic game where you play as the\u00a0villain\u00a0 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.<\/li>\n <li>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\u00a0separate\u00a0natives. 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\u00a0didn&#8217;t\u00a0put in a kill screen it just closes. Thanks so much to JarSplice, you saved my ass.<\/li>\n <li>Finished, with my lack of time I was afraid that I wouldn&#8217;t have a finished product but I managed it, although it is not as fleshed out as I would have hoped.<\/li>\n <li>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&#8217;t find an alternative\u00a0approach\u00a0that\u00a0didn&#8217;t\u00a0use slick. I needed to display the score and points and costs and I\u00a0didn&#8217;t\u00a0see any options. Then I said to myself &#8220;NO! I&#8217;m going to finish this! I&#8217;m gonna make something. It doesn&#8217;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.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>What went wrong:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li><span style=\"line-height: 13px\">SLICK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Slick, the library, hated me. I could not get it to do anything right for me and the\u00a0tutorials\u00a0I found were all for depreciated methods and they wouldn&#8217;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.<\/span><\/li>\n <li>TIME, I graduated and\u00a0partied\u00a0most of the weekend and\u00a0probably\u00a0only 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.<\/li>\n <li>MAVEN, There really needs to be a good archetype for maven that uses lwjgl. The tutorial for using maven on\u00a0their\u00a0website 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.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>Future:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>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.<\/li>\n <li>I want to flesh out the game with graphics, sound and ACTUAL TEXT ON THE SCREEN DAMMIT. I joined the One Game A Month\u00a0challenge\u00a0so I think I will flesh this out and release a newer version for January&#8217;s game.<\/li>\n <li>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.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>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.<\/p>","time":"December 18th, 2012 9:13 am","title":"Splatter: A Post-Mortem"}