GunHack Postmortem

Link to the entry

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-20/?action=rate&uid=4173

Gameplay

TimeLapse

Postmortem

What a blast. Our team entered the Jam for LD48 #20 on a whim. I watched @notch live streaming his LD48 entry progress in LD48 #19 and it inspired me to clear the weekend and participate in the next one. I had an idea I wanted to try during the compo but I also wanted to work with two of my good friends. I was glad when they both decided to participate and we all entered the Jam. We’ve worked together in the past on other project but never tried to do anything within the scope of 72h.

What went right

Tech – We decided to use a new XPlatform basecode layer my friend has been working on for quite some time. It had never really been tested outside of a few component tests on his machine. This turned out to be a huge win for us and the tech enabled us to get in way more content and achieve much higher production values then could have ever anticipated.

Team – I know LD48 celebrates the lone wolf developer and I love that and I have huge respect for all the participants who submitted entries. You work is inspiring. But man, I love working with these two friends. There’s something about getting a small team together and seeing something come together that is better then any one of you would have thought of individually.

Refactoring – This was pretty key to my contributions to the game, if I ran into code that was getting brute force or fairly unmaintainable I would think about it and come up with an implementation that significantly reduced the amount of code and the complexity of the task. This was the key to getting multiple enemies in with behaviors and art in various directions. If I hadn’t taken the time to refine the code for one enemy before adding the others I’m not sure they all would have made it in. This is kind of counter intuitive when you think that you are supposed to be coding quickly, sometimes taking the time time to go slow helps you go fast :)

Art – I wasn’t expecting it but we all ended up falling in love with how the look of the game came together. Enough that I think we’ll keep working on it and round it out into a full product.

What went Wrong

Slow start - When we started we hadn’t even got our machines set up and ensured that we could buil and run the tech on more then one computer. The first few hours of LD48 were spent configuring an SVN repository and installing drivers. Next time we’ll be sure to be start with fully prepped dev environments ready to start strong out of the gates.

Low Sleep / Bad Food – We had too much beer and deep fried things. Note to self, next compo eat healty and sleep more.

Leaving Interface Issues to the end – The mouse interface in the game feels more like a barrier to playing the game then something that enables it. The issues with it were known as are the solutions, but leaving it till late in the timeline was a mistake. Get your control issues sorted early!

Only one dude did the timelapse – The other dudes know, and next time they will do it too! :)

LD48 – In the end, being productive is just so much fun! It’s still hard to believe we made as much game as we did in such a short amount of time. I start fantasizing about how many games we could make if we keep doing these jams. It’s really exciting.