Ludum Dare 48h #3 Postmortem: Balooga03's Prepare For War

Now the Compo, and I can one more time look back at some productive 48 hours. Time to do a appropriate Postmortem. First with only three Pros and cons, but I think in the next days I'll note down some more points as will have the time to think about the weekend.

What went Right:

1. Pre-Production

Having a reliable framework, helped very much. 'Cause when you get bugs you always know what its not. You can geta working programm together very fast and concentrate on game-specific Code. Sticking with known design Patterns like Singletons or Factorys helped also very much. The Use of TinyXml was one of the best decisions I think. Development gets really fast with it!

2. Art

Very early I decided On the Style of the game, I drew most of the sprites then and didn't need to redraw any. I made some scribbles too, and created a mockup. This helped very much, because i always knew in what to work on. The decision to use such a limited color range made it possible to losslessly use 8-bit runtime encoded .BMPs which hold the size of the final entry low. for example the first level got down from 24bit ~900 Kb to ~22 Kb without any color reduction.

3. Coding Style

Using a consistent coding Style throughout the whole project proved to be really productive. Some of the things i wrote for and in the compo can be reused with little tweaks, as the relly dirty hacks only appeared in the last two hours or so.

What went Wrong:

1. Pre-Compo thoughts

Hanging around thinking about various themes was very unproductive, as the only one i ignored made it.

2. Game Idea

The game idea itself was not that bad at all i think but to make a fun game out of it is very hard within 48 hours with the self-given restrictions, style and code-wise.

3. Time Management

At the beginning i had a lot of idle time where i just didn't know what to do next. After making a Todo-List it worked better but not as good as it should have. Bug search was also not included in my time plan, after searching one bug for over an hour i really had to hurry, I compiled my entry 4 minutes before regular compo end, that made it impossible to write a decent Readme.

Game Data:

Development System:

Win 98,800 Mhz Athlon, 512 MB Ram, GeForce 2 GTS

Software used:

Visual c++ 6.0, Paintshop Pro 7.0, Notepad, Cooledit Pro 2.0.

Technologies:

Allegro, TinyXml.

Size:

2409 lines of code in 41 C++ files, 49 kb. Plus Pre-Contest Code: 2002 lines of code in 18 C++ files, 39 kb.