($SRCROOT)\dungeon Postmortem

I haven’t formally done one of these before, so…here we go!

Original goals:
– Make a roguelike in a weekend. [Success!]
– Score in top 100 in Audio. [Not going to happen this time.]
– Score in top 50% in all categories. [We’ll see…]

What went right:
– I tried to a do a random dungeon generator in a day a while back and failed, but the generator for ($SRCROOT)\dungeon was done in about 10 hours, with only some infrequent minor bugs that I’ve found so far.
– I did not spend more time on art assets than their end quality warranted, as I have before.
– Some very simple tweaks brought the style together at the end.

What went wrong:
– Ugh…The Javascript library I’ve been using/reworking for the past two years has gotten so messy. I have collision bugs that I can’t find, and I have to reinterpret the basic code every time I use it.
– No music. That was one of my main goals, yet I didn’t prioritize it and ran out of time.
– Like last time, the game’s too hard. Partially I just didn’t have the time to balance it properly, but partially I clung too tightly to some original design ideas.

What to do for LD 29:
– Change to a better engine. I have a solid one in the works in C++ and might use that, though running in browser is nice.
– If still using Javascript, find a good IDE for it (any suggestions?). I lost a significant amount of time to repeated syntax errors or incorrect variable names. I like Sublime Text, but…
– Actually do music. Heck, I might design the whole game around it.
– I should probably try harder to design my game to the theme next time.

If you like really hard roguelikes, you can give ($SRCROOT)\dungeon a try here. Thanks!