Well, as I’ve been working on it throughout the week, I’ve been putting a lot more effort into it, and it’s been going way past the original 48hr game concept, hehe.
\n As such, I thought I’d post up a post-mortem on what went wrong in the 48 hours, and what went right.<\/p>\n
The Good.<\/p>\n
The theme was great. I love sandbox style games, be it sandbox in a “giant world to do as you please” sense, or even in a “here’s a puzzle, figure it out as you like” sense – as Little Quirks was to be. So that got the creative juices flowing, so to speak!<\/p>\n
My concept was very simple – basically a Lemmings clone where they can crawl up and along walls and ceilings. The art was nice and simple too, fitting with the cute aesthetics as well.<\/p>\n
The engine was in better shape than last time, after being used in another couple of projects since LD11 ( Plight of The Weedunks being one of the most well known – yes, this is basically the same engine, minus the 3D layer! ) and I got something up and running very quickly, and only took an hour to upgrade the engine to do dynamic colour replacement.<\/p>\n
The Bad.<\/p>\n
Hard drive hiccup. That wasn’t fun, especially seeing as I’ve just recently replaced one of them. Losing several hours of work is a killer, and more so when you’re in the middle of an SVN commit to an external server to try and avoid losing too much. Moral of the story, save and commit often!<\/p>\n
Sound. Or lack thereof. I actually factored no time in for sound. This may have went against me if I had actually finished within the time limit. Something to be wary of for LD15; making time for everything is quite tough, but then that’s half the challange of Ludum Dare!<\/p>\n
The Ugly.<\/p>\n
Tilechecks are quick, and for the most part work very well. However, when there’s a lot of logic behind what your entities are doing (crawling around any side of a tile), those tilechecks quickly spiral out of control. I really should have been doing pixel checking with a hotspot being at the bottom of the sprite. Then again, I was able to get a ludicrous amount of them squirming around, with a full Lua-based state machine for each of them which a more expensive pixel check routine may not have allowed. A puzzle for sure as to what would’ve been better \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n
What Next?<\/p>\n
It’s become apparant that there’s actually a bit of depth in this concept while I’ve been continuing it after work, and it’s been slowly going beyond just a 48hr game. I’ve decided to continue working on it on the run up to LD15, as it’ll let me see what my engine still requires, and fix some of the hideous bugs I’ve uncovered along the way.<\/p>\n
I’ll still be releasing the game – source and all – when it’s done, and probably post it up here complete with final tag … more than likely 48 days after MiniLD11 rather than 48 hours \ud83d\ude09 Tags: little quirks<\/a>, post-mortem<\/a><\/p>","time":"July 29th, 2009 2:49 pm","title":"A Little Post-Mortem"}
\n The game was also designed for handhelds ( GP2X, Wiz, and Dingoo in particular – click for image – <\/a> ) so you’ll probably see it on one of the sites for those hand helds when it’s done too ![\":)\"](\"http:\/\/www.stuckiegamez.co.uk\/gamez\/ludumdare\/miniLD11\/Wiz-GP2X-Dingoo.jpg\")
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