Burning Light – Post Mortem

It’s time to look back on how the making of ‘Burning Light’ went. I’ve compiled an annotated timelapse with most of the development:

Quick note: even though I took part of the compo, since it started Friday, 10 P.M, I actually divided my time into three logical days.

As usual, it took me all of the “first” day to come up with an idea. Before giving up and going to sleep, I decided to post my progress here. As I properly described my ideas, I had a new one that was of my liking.

As soon as the “second” day started, I quickly decided on the overall look of the game. Once again, I’ve used the DB32 palette, which has been my default palette for some time. Because of that, I feel like this game looks a lot like my previous entries, specially with LD32’s Kitten.

Although I decided on doing a quick prototype, I actually failed pretty badly at that… Because of a dumb bug (and because I wouldn’t give up on mathematical correctness over simply finishing something) that took me around 6 hours to fix, I wasn’t done with the prototype until the end of the first 24 hours. By that time, I had no other choice but to go with the idea…

Luckily, whenever I to took a break, I would either play the guitar or draw something. So even though I was running quite late, I also had already done most of the graphics. But I had no actual gameplay… And I didn’t have time to add sounds/music…

I woke up early on the last day and start to draw the UI and the player. From that, building that initial mock into a game was somewhat easy… until the final few hours.

When I started to create the level, I began to notice lots of corner cases. I tried to avoid them and come up with a neat level design, but I couldn’t do it. Eventually, I simply gave up a created a simple and short level.

30 minutes before the deadline, I had finished something (questionably) playable, so I began to package everything. I must say that my workflow for building is really effective. I quickly built a fully packaged game (with all required libs) for both Linux and Windows.

Overall, even though my game was way simpler (and buggier) than It could had been, I’m quite happy with the results. I may do a quick post-compo version, since I’d like to enhance my library’s collision detection… We’ll see…

Now (well, when I get back from work XD), I’ll go back to playing and commenting on games! o/