{"author_name":"NeiloGD","cat":"LD #22","comments":[],"epoch":1324368540,"likes":1,"metadata":{"p_key":"60196","p_author":"NeiloGD","p_authorkey":"1154","p_urlkey":"95949","p_title":"\u201cLeave My Lettuce Alone :(\u201d Post-mortem","p_cat":"LD #22","p_event":"LD22","p_time":"1324368540","p_likes":"1","p_comments":"1","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"1154","us_name":"NeiloGD","us_username":"neilo","event_start":"1323993600","event_key":"8","event_name":"LD22"},"text":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What went right:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

– The Food & Drink:<\/p>\n

Prepared enough food for myself for the weekend, made sure the house was stocked up with enough to eat and drink in case I became bored of consuming that. Only drank 4 energy drinks over the weekend, and avoided coffee and alcohol.<\/p>\n

– The Idea:<\/p>\n

I came up with an idea pretty quickly, and stayed focused on it until I had a working game mechanic. This took a total of 9 hours with 1 good break in the middle.<\/p>\n

– The Graphics:<\/p>\n

Decided right away that I’d be hand drawing all my graphics. For this I used a graphics tablet, and was the best decision I made yet. Initially planned to make a 3D game, went ahead and made a 2D prototype, but had more than enough time to turn it into a 3D game during the second day and did!<\/p>\n

– The Engine:<\/p>\n

This is the 3rd LD I’ve used my own engine, I was going to be doing it in C# with a port of my engine initially, but decided against this as I’ve fixed a lot of bugs over the last year and it would be throwing away productivity if I didn’t take advantage of this.<\/p>\n

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What went wrong:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

– The Sound & Music:<\/p>\n

Completely uninspired musically and don’t have the greatest library of synths, and not totally familiar with the tools I chose to use. Sound wise I didn’t produce much. The sounds I created were quickly made with Audacity recording with a microphone and filtering.<\/p>\n

– The Submission:<\/p>\n

Thanks to a recent update I made to my engine to do multithreaded rendering, and only testing on single\/dual core machines, I missed a critical bug in my job system which prevented it from working on a machine with more than 2 cores. It’s been fixed now, but it’s something I should have tested before hand.<\/p>\n

– The Development “Hardware”:<\/p>\n

To make sure the game worked for most others, I developed the game in Windows XP…inside Virtual Box…in OSX. This was a nightmare as the GL window will block Visual Studio when hitting a breakpoint, causing several headaches…not to mention that GL is slow inside a VM (could be considered an advantage performance wise since it’ll run smoothly on almost any machines). Next time I will be using a hard machine, hopefully with Windows 7 installed, and do compatibility testing inside a VM & on other machines.<\/p>\n

– The Sleep & Night Before:<\/p>\n

The day before LD it was my companies xmas party, which meant I drank a lot, and got very little sleep before LD. This turned out not to be so bad as the adrenaline of LD hit me hard! Saturday night (well…Sunday morning) I scraped 5 hours sleep before the second day. Didn’t sleep Sunday night and continued to work, but got there eventually. Monday was taken off work as a means of catching up on sleep, but sleeping through the Monday messed up the sleep that night, causing me to remain tired on the Tuesday. Could be worse, thought I managed it fine, but not so much as I would have liked.<\/p>\n

Before next Ludum Dare:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

– Ensure I’m familiar with all my tools.<\/p>\n

– Test on several different machines.<\/p>\n

– Improve my engine’s content pipeline.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My entry can be found here:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-22\/?action=rate&uid=1154<\/a><\/p>\n

The timelapse video is here:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=3Wm9wcr5JBs<\/a><\/p>\n

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 <\/p>","time":"December 20th, 2011 3:09 am","title":"\u201cLeave My Lettuce Alone :(\u201d Post-mortem"}