Cyber Sh*tty – Postmortem

Intro

Thought I’d write up my post-mortem of the 48 hour Jam, my first Jam ever.

It started at about 04:00 in the morning when I woke up for no reason and thought I’d check for the theme – 10 seconds, cool I thought, look forward to seeing everyone submitting their work in progress and stuff. I wasn’t planning on entering as I didn’t feel capable at the time, and hadn’t done the warm up. By the afternoon, I realised that hey, this is really cool and I’m soooo jealous of everyone who is working on a game so gotta get a piece of the action. Explained to my wife that I was going to hijack the whole weekend (she is really really understanding I have to say).

In a Jam

Day 1

So the next step was an idea, I decided to base it on one of my favourite Manga movies (Cyber City OEDO 808) as the theme seemed to fit and I really couldn’t think of anything else (trap number 1). The first day coding the game which I decided would be a top-down shooter.

The best part of the day was spent trying to get the camera to scroll correctly and detecting collisions. Didn’t really like what I had done, so went to bed and thought I would just sleep on the idea.

Got up 20 minutes later, when I thought my wife had dropped off to sleep, and snuck downstairs. Decided I really had to make up for lost ground.

Decided to make a platform game instead (trap number 2).

I hadn’t realised just how much worse it was to make a platformer, my previous issues with cameras and collision detection were multiplied by a factor of 10 (that’s just me, I’m sure you guys and girls out there are far more capable and better organised).

In the end I spent the majority of the time trying to stop the player from falling through floors and realised it was getting a bit late and I should start on shooting and an actual level.

Day 2

Time for some graphics I thought, but how best to do them? Decided I was going to draw everything by hand in a manga-esque style.

10 minutes later, realised this was going to take up even more time, since I wouldn’t be able to resist adding at least some colour fills to all the graphics. In the end I settled on block computer generated graphics rather than sprites.

OK, so I can jump, and only fall through the floor about 33% of the time, I can shoot and it nearly almost registers it. Time to add some particle blood! (trap number 3).

In total I probably spent 3 hours trying to get a particle system up and running and it still wasn’t satisfactory. I decided to make it cherry blossom instead of blood as cherry blossom features quite a lot in the manga and I’m quite pleased with it at this stage, but have really sucked up a lot of time.

Decided to start work on the level design. Came up with a building silhouette for the hotel level and then exported it as JSON from Tiled. Only then did I realise that it exports it as a 1D array and also I hadn’t set it up as 0-indexed so all my tileIDs were nudged over by 1 which caused me a slight headache. Had to write some code to convert the 1D array to 2D array which I hadn’t factored in to my time schedule.

At this point I had pretty much decided it was time to throw in the towel, I had a prototype I could add to the collection, and hey I had tried…

Come on Lazyeels, you’ve come this far AND the whole weekend would have been a waste and that would be unfair to you and your wife! And how much better would I feel if I had actually submitted something even if it was a bit sh*t. Never surrender…!

It was time to work on spawning code to randomly place the enemy, after a bit of work I got something working, or so I thought. Realised there was a bug in the code caused by the fact that the tileIDs were not 0-indexed i.e. the code was checking against tile number 9 for the floor, it should have been tile number 10. Doh! On top of this, the player could now shoot through walls as a result, which I hadn’t checked for – was just happy it wasn’t falling through the floor so often. :-)

Final count down

Time to add a title screen and missions etc. In the end this was the bit I was most chuffed with. Up to this point I had never ever created a game that was this complete, in the sense that it felt like a game, rather than a prototype that launched you straight in. With only a few hours to go, and along with the guilt I felt for hijacking the whole of the weekend – my wife was very supportive during the whole thing – but obviously I had just announced my participation at the last minute, I decided to start working on hosting the content and building the about page, control instructions, and called it a day a night.

What went right?

– I finished something.

What went wrong?

– Obvious take on the theme, therefore did not contribute anything new or innovative.

– Not getting a basic prototype working with basic shapes as entities to find the mechanic.

– Too much time spent faffing (yay, particle system!) and going from one problem to the next without completing each part of the game before moving to the next (collisions and camera scrolling).

– Too many bugs left unchecked.

– Lack of any sound or music.

– Tried something a bit too ambitious for my current skill set.

In the end

In the end it was an awesome experience and so much fun to be a part of, the best bit is seeing how everyone else spent their 48 hours and what they did with the theme, and knowing there is bunch of other people working at the same time for the same goal.

Also good to get feedback both good and bad. I now know what the game is and how it can be improved. I’ve also learnt that I need to focus, focus, focus next time and be more prepared.