The Cloud of Very Angry Electrons – Post Mortem

This was my first #LD48, and it was a complete disaster. Everything went reasonably well the first day, but on the second day I discovered multiple bugs with my graphics engine.

• Camera rotation culling glitch
• cRenderLine was completely broken
• TransformPoint did not work with rotation

I was able to fix these, but they took a serious toll on my project time, and I had quickly discovered that my lack of developing any real time-saving tools was coming at a serious cost. Then the final day happened. A bug in my physics engine meant that I could not destroy any object that was touching another object or everything would crash. Multiple workarounds failed until I resorted to moving objects out of the way, and even then I was largely out of time, resulting in a game that is just barely winnable and losable but just about as broken as you can be while still being technically playable.

Despite sucking total balls and being at a serious disadvantage, the competition taught me a lot about what needs to happen to make my engine usable, primarily requiring an editor of some sort. Granted, I probably could have used lots of free 3rd party engines that weren’t broken if I really wanted to make a game, but half of this was all about testing my own engine to see how it held up. It did not, and consequently requires more work. If you want to see my failed attempt, here is the entry.