Well, it’s that time of year again! I can already taste (or smell?) the code in the air! This competition I’ll be using a new skill set that I’ve acquired since the last competition (August 24).
My Tools:
-Java
-Eclipse IDE
-SFXR
-Paint.NET
My Libraries:
-LWJGL (OpenGL, OpenAL, etc..)
-Slick_Util.jar (OpenGL textures, BufferedImageUtil)
-LWJGL_Util (GLUPerspective)
Speaking of Ludum Dare, I never got around to writing a Post-Mortem entry after the competition, so here it is:
Overview:
At the time I didn’t have much knowledge of font or 3D, so I used my knowledge of Java2D. I ended up encountering many problems during the competition due to my lack of experience (I had just started to learn java, my first programming language, in May). The first 5 hours were pretty mundane, with a lot of utility coding to handle buffered images and AWT frames, but I managed to create a fully functional game base code that served me well throughout the competition. After that, I started work on the game environment. The only problem was, I hadn’t much thought of an idea so I really had to go off of what I had in my mind at the time, which was a classic osmosis type of game style (which was the only thing I could think of with a theme like evolution). A little while into coding, I realized I didn’t exactly think of the most memory efficient way to implement this (a 5000 pixels square image) and I ran out of memory. I panicked, and quickly simplified the idea into a type of board game, which turned out to be too complex to code in the remaining time. In the last 10 hours, I finally just decided to create a simple remix of conway’s game of life to turn it into an actual game. Because this idea was a lot more fun to play than I expected and because I was placed 95th in innovation, I considered it to be a good competition overall.
Things that went right:
-The final idea that I came up with turned out to be pretty fun and creative
-While slightly flawed, I wrote some pretty good base code that reduced the amount of repetition required
-I used a language that supported all platforms, so I didn’t have to make an effort to port the game (except to fix bugs on mac’s demented JVM release)
-I wrote a pretty cool AI to challenge the player
Things that went wrong:
-I tried to implement too many mechanics into one idea
-I disregarded all boundaries of the java virtual machine and created tons of memory leaks
-Throughout my program, I wrote some pretty inefficient code that cost me some time
-I was new to coding, so I had to debug pretty much everything I wrote
Overall:
Because of the final product’s innovation, challenge, and creativity, along with it’s fairly good ranking , I considered this competition a success.
Photos:
-My Lunch, consisting of home-made macaroni and cheese,
along with a mixture of orange juice and mountain dew (which
tasted pretty interesting), and my coding station for the duration of the
competition:
I’m working on a way to disable that. I could use a different key for jump, but that just feels wrong. I bet someone else has run into this same problem?
