Ok. Managed to upload and post the thing properly, so now I can relax and write some stuff about it.
This one was a shaky ride for sure. Throughout the first day I kept a laid-back attitude and sort of held a leisurly pace. Spent a lot of time on IRC and elsewhere, but still got a fair amount of code done. Second day started well, with some bugfixing and new implementation. Halfway through though, I started realizing that I didn’t really know exactly where I was going with this in terms of gameplay, and sensed a wall rising before me.
I was stuck for a few hours incabable of deciding what direction I should go with things and actually considered (briefly) forfeiting the whole thing… I came to my senses though and decided to salvage it as best I could by making some fun gfx and audio. As soon as I got a “living” player character and some sound effects in there it suddenly felt a whole lot better. I should have done that way earlier. With just one or two hours left on the clock I was all inspired again… dang.
The last hour was a blur of stressed music-making, panicked code-juggling to get it playing in the game, and some begging to get a few minutes to wrap things up in a respectable manner before making the final post. But it worked out in the end (sort of).
I just wish I could bend my sense of time/planning to actually fit reality a little better. I always act like I have all the time in the world until I’m literally running right out of it. THAT’s the point where I start doing actual work, and kicking straight into highest gear. If I had started working on the media 5 hours earlier (back when I didn’t do much of anything anyway) I would have had time to properly tweak things and maybe make a “good” song rather than a doesn’t-quite-make-you-rip-your-ears-off one.
Anyway, despite the little crisis and gloomy bughunts I will remember this compo fondly. I did have a lot of fun on IRC over the first day and a half, and the last pull-together of stuff for my entry made all the difference between a sense of failure and modest accomplishment. The final product didn’t end up being a proper game (as usual) but at least I’m not embarrassed of it.
I have an exam in 2.5 hours that I neglected studying for, so I’ll just sleep for a bit instead I think. Life’s tough, but you need to get your priorities straight… I’ll re-take it in March or thereabouts.
As for food, I don’t hold any sort of lightsource to the grand masters who have been posting here, but I did consume something like 10x the amount of sugar that I’d normally do over this time period. Lots of candy and soda, yuk. My tummy doesn’t quite like me atm. Also downed some chicken, pasta, vegetables and milk (which constitutes my staple diet) – and pilsnerkorv!
I kept a slightly more detailed/rambly timelog in my main.cpp which is included in the submission zip. Check it if you’re interested. Oh, also I forgot/neglected to put in some library code that’s needed for the game to compile… tinyptc, portaudio and playmu (which is my sort of in-development musagi playback library, used it for LD9 as well). I don’t see much point in uploading them at this point, but they’re available to anyone who might ask. I’ll have to clean up playmu at some point and upload it to my homepage properly.
Looking forward to checking out all the entries soonish, after some R&R. Congrats to everyone who joined/tried/failed/succeeded!
Tags: post-mortem
Oh well, I got most of what I wanted done. Not like you’d ever have got to the boss anyway.
