"Battlefield: Stars" Postmortem

What went right

The game went overall very nicely... The ludiEngine3d behaved more or less as expected (more on this in the "What went wrong" section), the 3d Studio exporter worked like a charm, the framework was more functional than I was expecting... The graphics also came out right (for my meager skills, that is), and the sound effects worked allright.
The idea to use 3d Studio Max 4 to make the levels (using user props) was a very good one, since it enabled me to make 4 levels in the 15 minutes before deadline...
I think the game is so fun that I'm going to expand the idea, with powerups, enable the ship to move, add an AI opponent, etc...
This time, the organization worked fine enough... Start small and add functions; for instance, I didn't got stuck when the texturing on the planets wouldn't show up, I used the planet without texture until I could take the time to fix it (after most gameplay elements were in place)

What went wrong

Horrible breakdown in the 2d part of the LudiEngine3d; I did lots of errors in the coding of the 2d component of LudiEngine, but I didn't notice them until I mixed 2d and 3d and used more than one image!
LudiEngines3d's resource manager failed miserably in the clearing department, which made me change my whole levels and add some more bugs to them! Need to fix that urgently... A texturing bug that wasn't a bug that took me one hour to fix: the texture just had an alpha channel all set to full transparency; need to add a renderstate manager so that I can see what is happening beneath the hood
Too little time: some friends of mine came to visit me in the weekend, so I lost almost 20 hours because of that...
Problems with FMod (I think); the release version of the game doesn't have any sound; need to find a good alternative
Couldn't upload in time; So my entry isn't at the moment (7/4/2003 - 4:08pm) online, so the first voters won't probably vote on my game...
VERY BUGGY game... I found the critical errors too late for me to do something about them; the broken resource manager, FMod's problem with Release builds, the disappearing particle systems, etc

Overall

Overall, considering the time I had to work on it, Battlefield - Stars is a fun game to play and it doesn't look that bad... I hope I'll have time in the next months to expand it, but I seriously doubt it; I wish I had, since I have enough ideas for it that would make it a sellable game in the indy market (I think)... So, as usual, this compo was very nice; wish I had time every weekend to spend making this stuff!

Finally, I just want to thank Geoff Howland for the patience and setting this up!