Well, that was quite an experience. Ludum Dare 26 has come and gone and I have very little to show for it. Due to a lack of planning on my part and some issues with conflicting responsibilities eating up my time, I didn't end up with anything to submit at the end of this game jam. Not to say I didn't get anything from the competition though. I did get my feet wet, so to speak, and in doing so I think I came away with a number of ways I can improve upon my time management next round.
For instance, I discovered that I was spending a good amount of time coding things I could have easily gotten from existing libraries. The problem was, that I wasn't familiar with these libraries ahead of time, so I instead spent too much time coding it from scratch. Something as simple as a particle effect library or physics library could have helped me out immensely. I intend to spend the next few months getting myself acquainted with these libraries and finding out what I can do to avoid spending precious time trying to rewrite these things.
Another lesson learned was that next time I shouldn't try to do this from home. Family life, and other responsibilities can easily demand attention that will prevent a game from being finished. I ended up doing the majority of my coding in the morning (when the family was still sleeping) and in the evening (after everyone had retired). The whole 10-12 hours in between were just a cluster f*ck where I rarely accomplished anything of value.
I did manage to get a few interesting classes and functions out of this whole experience as well. The theme for the game was that it should be minimalistic in some way. I wanted to apply this to the artistic direction, so many of the objects drawn to the screen were basic shapes. I made them hallow, so that I could easily fill in the objects with whatever color I wanted. It was my intention to create several arrays with different color schemes that could be interchanged for each level. I had that working the first morning.
Next thing I wanted was some sort of map generation. I had a friend willing to work on this for me. He had already worked on something similar for one of his previous classes, and he figured he could easily rewrite it for me.
Another thing I was working on, (didnt get finished with it, but I have some promising code so far) was player movement that moved the screen around with it. I'd never done anything like that with a previous game so it was something new. I really should have attempted something like it prior to this game jam, since I spent a lot of time on this. I was also trying to incorporate a parallex effect using layered images moving at different speeds to give the game some depth. This was also somewhat new to me as I had read about it but not actually attempted it myself. Like I said, I have some promising code, but nothing completely working.
I also managed to get a pretty neat looking background for the game. I created a class that you can pass a surface (to draw to), a color scheme object, and the number of objects to be created: and the class would create a background object with small moving particles. It was a pretty neat effect, and as soon as I have some time, I'll post the code along with a little video clip or gif.
So I ended up with some pretty neat stuff and a neat idea for a game, but unfortunately it just didn't get to the "playable" phase. I might continue working on it, but I'm not sure when I'll have the time. At least I came away with a few lessons and even some neat code that I can implement elsewhere. All in all, it was a good time and I can't wait for the next Ludum Dare to come around.
Cheers,
-Newt
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