I’m Done!

Hi

Oh man, this Ludum Dare was down to the wire for me. It was also an incredible experience.

What went right:

The idea: I think Heart is based on a really great concept. Not everyone will be able to play Heart to completion. In fact, only about 1 in 3 people who start playing it will be able to finish it. I guess I have to qualify what it means to “finish” a game that is so incomplete… maybe I’ll go do that.

I learned a huge amount about pixel art! I’ve never done any drawing or ever had any confidence with respect to that, but about mid-way through day one I realized that I was just going to have to make do. At first I was frantically running around trying to get a “sprite editor” or something… and then finally out of desperation I just said, “forget it! I’ll draw it all be hand”. I then proceeded to draw a rock – by hand on paper – upload a photo of it to Dropbox, and then resize with Gimp. I remembered reading that shrinking an image makes it pixelated, and it totally worked. The assets were made in this order: rock, hero, tree, sword, plant, monster. I’ve posted some screen-shots and you can really see how much I improved my draw/photo/gimp workflow. The last sprite, the monster, blew my mind. Special thanks to my girlfriend Rie for teaching me about Gimp’s various colour tools.

What went wrong:

Practice makes perfect, but this LD has made me realize that I am a ways away from being a “Game Programmer” capital letters. I am a programmer, and a competent web-developer, and I’d say I have a pretty good head for game design… but the things that go into programming a game are still very difficult and mystifying for me. I spent at least half of this Dare working on making the “zelda-style” sliding screen work. It just kept creeping up! Any time I’d change anything, I’d have to go back and fix some bug in the slide! It amazed me the degree to which that simple task was a challenge to me. Finally, even now when all is live, there are still very big bugs in that slide!

What will I do differently next time:

I don’t want to shy away from game programming, I want to dive in. At the same time, though, given that these jams are 48 hours, I might be better off choosing a framework like Game Maker that is more “plug-and-play”. I used Quintus for this jam, and I think it is a fine library (though still in development), but it didn’t give me the out of the box flexibility that I really needed to get off the ground running. I started with Twine, and then puzzlescript, and I think the jump to Quintus was maybe too far. So next time, I’ll try to find something that fits a little tighter. Oh man, for example: I ended up using bootstrap modal dialogues for in game text, rather than rely on Quintus. That shouldn’t happen!

Look at how much I’ve improved: zero to hero in one Dare!

OK everyone! Thanks!