{"author_name":"pbdiode","cat":"LD #22","comments":[],"epoch":1324434780,"likes":1,"metadata":{"p_key":"60126","p_author":"pbdiode","p_authorkey":"7263","p_urlkey":"95879","p_title":"ALONE with K.I.T.T.I. Postmortem","p_cat":"LD #22","p_event":"LD22","p_time":"1324434780","p_likes":"1","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"7263","us_name":"pbdiode","us_username":"pbdiode","event_start":"1323993600","event_key":"8","event_name":"LD22"},"text":"

You can find ALONE with K.I.T.T.I. here:\u00a0http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-22\/?action=rate&uid=7263<\/a><\/p>\n

What went wrong?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There was an unexpected family emergency that took up the better part of 10 hours. The emergency was unavoidable, and unforeseen. It was unfortunate, but I absolutely do not regret missing the 10 hours.<\/p>\n

That said, 10 hours is a lot of time in a 48 hour competition. After sleeping for about 10 total hours and the family emergency, I was left with about 28 hours of total work time. Not bad, but it was not evenly distributed, requiring some energy drinks and long periods without sleep. If I had had the 10 hours, about 4 of it would have been for sleeping on Saturday night, and the rest would have been time spent on polish.<\/p>\n

My first time sync when working on the project was going with the sprite.js library — it’s an amazing library, but I hit a wall when I realized the support for Tiled, which I was banking on, was not really all that complete. I was going to use melonJS<\/a> from the outset, but then a couple of days before the competition, I decided sprite.js would offer a better experience. I had tested it out before the competition, and thought I could get everything to work based off of one of the libraries examples, but you know how that goes.<\/p>\n

I ended up switching everything over to melonJS<\/a>, which has faculties for reading Tiled maps directly.\u00a0In the end, I think this was beneficial to the overall project, but it did eat up time. If I had just used melonJS<\/a> from the beginning (like I had originally planned), I would have had at least another 3 hours of work time.<\/p>\n

My second time sync was maps. I initially built a small test map, and iterated features over that map. The test map was an excellent strategy I think, but coming off of that I jumped into a really large map — bigger than I needed by several factors. I wasted a lot of time just trying to fill it in and make it playable. I eventually shrunk the map down, but I spent an awful lot of time with a map that I ended up throwing away.<\/p>\n

I think if I would have just did a little more level design up front on a piece of paper, I could have avoided this time sync, and probably got several more hours to work on polish and other levels.<\/p>\n

More experience with the Tiled editor would have helped to, but it’s pretty easy to pick up.<\/p>\n

What went right?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tools! I knew my tool chain fairly well — I’m certainly middle of the road\u00a0competency\u00a0wise, but I have been using gimp, vim, \u00a0and javascript\/html\/css for quite a while and was at least comfortable with how they worked. I think this saved me a lot of heart ache.<\/p>\n

The things I didn’t know well were sprite.js, melonJS<\/a>, sfxr, Tiled and the music generating python script that GreaseMonkey posted about:\u00a0http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/2011\/12\/13\/if-you-find-it-hard-to-make-music-read-this\/<\/a><\/p>\n

However, I did practice using these tools before the competition, so I was comfortable using them, and they didn’t offer any surprises, or set backs (other than plain inexperience).<\/p>\n

melonJS<\/a> was fantastic to work with, and really easy to pick up with the great examples on their website.<\/p>\n

Tiled is an amazing editor — combined with melonJS<\/a>\u00a0I think it really saved the project after the 10 hours I spent away from the competition.<\/p>\n

And, of course sfxr really added a little something to the game. I’m no sound engineer, but having absolutely no sounds in a game is almost as maddening as eating at a\u00a0restaurant\u00a0without background music. sfxr is amazing.\u00a0On top of that, it’s really easy to use!<\/p>\n

And the\u00a0Autotracker-Bu script from GreaseMonkey gave me something I thought I wouldn’t have. Perhaps the music isn’t perfect<\/em>\u00a0for the game, but it does add something.<\/p>\n

Summary?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My experience? Positive. I’ll definitely be doing this again. Next time I’m going to hopefully avoid emergencies, pass on the energy drinks, get some nice evenly distributed sleep, and know exactly what my libraries\/frameworks are capable of going into the competition.<\/p>\n

Happy Hacking, and I’ll see you all in April! (and possibly before that for the MiniLD’s!!)<\/p>\n \n

Tags: LD22<\/a>, post-mortem<\/a>, postmortem<\/a><\/p>","time":"December 20th, 2011 9:33 pm","title":"ALONE with K.I.T.T.I. Postmortem"}