Finally got the timelapse of me creating my entry uploaded to Youtube. You can find it here: http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=PLYye9zr32s<\/p>\n
I created it using Chronolapse, set to take a screenshot every 6 seconds. The video was encoded at 30FPS. Given the length of the video, this means that I spent almost exactly 16 hours working on my entry; more than I had hoped for, but a lot less time than I actually ‘needed’. Oh well.<\/p>\n
Just a quick reply to the comments on the submission so far: I’m glad you’re enjoying it! I could go and add to it for a Jam version, but I’d rather not. Don’t know why.<\/p>\n
Also to commenter Devenger: not sure you mean about getting stuck near the right-most altar. Just go back through the tunnels?<\/p>\n
Now for the post-mortmem:<\/strong> Art-wise, I can’t really complain – I was at the limits of my artistic ability as it was. I might have tweaked around with background colours and water tiles if I had the time, but I can’t see myself doing much better.<\/p>\n Sound… the sound effects are fine, I think. SFXr is a fantastic tool. The problem was background music – I have no idea how to create it, and it’s something I need to check up on for next time. I was going to use WolframTones, but that only produces MIDI files ( I can only play WAV ). Oh well.<\/p>\n At the start of the competition I considered how to use the theme best ( you can see this on the timelapse video). I didn’t have a decent game mechanic in mind, and trying to do it through story would have meant spending far too much time creating a GUI that could display the story (text). As it was, I decided to go with atmosphere – and I think I just about pulled it off.<\/p>\n If you haven’t yet done so, please try my submission “Quest for the 4 Altars”, and tell me what you think.
\n I made one huge mistake right at the start of making the entry, with regards to how the terrain was stored. I stored each screen as a quadtree of blocks. Moving off-screen triggered swapping out the ‘current’ quadtree for the appropriate replacement, and sending the player to the other side of the screen.\u00a0 What I should have done was store the entire world as one big quadtree, and just had the camera snap to fixed positions – or not. Really, if I could go back and chance one thing it would be this.
\n See, if I hadn’t done this I could have had my original winning conditions – collecting four ‘orbs’ instead of just seeing the four altars – in and working instantly. As it was, I had to scrap that because of my lack of time. Also, making one continuous world would have allowed me to grant the player special abilities after getting each orb – digging through walls, a jetpack, etc. – something that would have just raised too many problems with the current setup.<\/p>\n
\n http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-19\/?action=rate&uid=1886<\/p>","time":"December 20th, 2010 7:34 am","title":"Timelapse and Post-mortmem"}