Post-Mortem

Well, I made it! My entry is here. This project contained a lot of firsts for me- my first Ludum Dare, my first Javascript project, my first 2D project on my own, the first time I’ve created all my own assets. The end product isn’t much, but I still accomplished more in a weekend than I have since I first started wanting to make games! Now that the craziness of the compo is over, I’m taking the time to sit down and write an analysis of my experience- what went right, what went wrong, and what I learned. This is more for my own future reference than anything else, but maybe you’ll find it interesting as well.

What Went Right

When I was first conceptualizing the game, I was pretty concerned about using an isometric style, for a couple of reasons. My biggest fear was that I would be unable to go with the “colored rectangles” approach to prototyping and I would get bogged down in asset creation, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Asset creation took very little of my time, and overall I’m pretty pleased with how they all turned out, at least for my first-ever spriting project.

The in-game music and was recorded and added literally in the final minutes of the compo, so there are some issues I would have liked more time to iron out, but the actual process of putting it in went smoothly. In addition, the only sound effect in the game (played when a building is built) was added in the final eight minutes. sfxr made it pretty easy to generate something I’m happy with- in the future, I will definitely allocate more time to audio assets, but the process of creating and adding them went well.

As I mentioned earlier, this was my first foray into Javascript, and I’ve fallen a little bit in love with the language. It was very kind to me, and I’m excited to delve deeper into its finer points in the future.

And finally, this was a very good test of how well the process of iterative design works for me. I wasn’t afraid to rewrite or delete old code, and while that probably slowed my programming a little, it did mean that the game as it stands is pretty light on bugs.

What Went Wrong

I think the biggest thing that slowed me down this weekend was my lack of experience making isometric games. Frankly, going in, I had absolutely no idea how any of it worked, and I lost a lot of time to trial-and-error problem solving.

In a similar vein, my unfamiliarity with CraftyJS also put me at a disadvantage. I spent quite a bit of time, probably 90 minutes in total, working out how to alter an object’s hitbox for mouse input; and I wonder what I could have done with the time I spent reading through the library reference and source code.

And last, I lost quite a bit of time to stupid mistakes- forgetting commas and close-parens, spawning objects in the wrong section of code, that sort of thing. Although this is probably where I lost the most time, it is also the problem that is most outside of my control- while I could have spent another few hours practicing with CraftyJS before the compo started, the only way to cut down on my stupid mistakes is to get more experience programming. And I got a lot of experience programming this weekend. Which brings me to…

What I Learned

So many things. A lot of practical things, to be specific. A lot of practical things to do with Javascript and the CraftyJS library, to be more specific. But mostly I learned that LD is crazy amounts of fun, and I’m really looking forward to #28!

Thanks for reading, and please go check out my entry if you haven’t.