Pete Shinners' quick report

This is my quick report from the LudumDare 48-hour game development contest. July 12 - 14. I'm keeping this short, because there are already at least 10 other postmortems online.

I'm very pleased at what I was able to create. Go, Go, Scarecrow was written in Python using the Pygame package. In the end it is a very playable game where a scarecrow defends his crops from crows.

Sunday afternoon was when everything really came together. While I didn't get all the features I originally envisioned, I did finish much more than I thought I could. Breaking the game up into individual "days" with an animated sky. Getting all the crows to interact and animate nicely. I was able to get the game "sandwiched" into working menu and game over screens. Unfortuantely I did not get a chance to implement any sort of scoring.

In the end, I just needed more time. Unfortunately the first Friday night turned out to be unavailable, and I ended up going to work on Saturday. After the first 24 hours of the contest, I'd only worked about 4-5 hours on the game.

I was really excited to do a bunch of music and sound effects on my microphone, but I never got the chance. With more time, these are what I would have done (in priority)

• Sound effects and Music (me crowing into a microphone)
• Gameplay balance (it is very hard to lose)
• Scoring
• Optimizations (runs great for me though (1.3ghz celeron))
• Refine the graphics (most graphics were my "temp first pass")

I noticed Geoff said we could take a couple days to port this to other platforms. Since the game runs under pygame, it already runs on windows, unix, macosx. Still, with 3 lines of code I could enable full hardware acceleration, which would let it run insanely quicker on directx platforms. (I'll be asking about a "port" to directx). I just never got the chance to do that and test it.

Thanks for the great competition, LudumDare! Unfortunately I was so busy during the contest, I didn't have any time to really see how others were doing (just peeking at the occasional screenshot).