Postmortem

Well, I really don't feel too bad about my showing, as this was my first comp and it was a great deal of fun...However, that isn't to say that I didn't make a LOT of noobish mistakes...Here were the downfalls as I see them:

• Time Management - Between burning several hours at the start working on my rather crappy tune, and getting called away from my computer due to poor weekend planning, I was pretty well shot for finishing. Though I didn't really realize that until there was only an hour left in the comp. This is the one that really killed me...
• Resource Management - I would've been better off if I had set some actual parameters BEFORE I just started throwing things together. I probably would've saved some time in the long haul.
• Overemphasizing details - This is one of those situations where I really should have taken a step back looked at my time remaining early on and accepted what I could do within a tighter timeframe instead of trying to make everything "right". I should have given up on the audio after I had wasted my third hour on it...Instead I burnt six and still got a tune that I'm not entirely pleased with. I either need to focus on improving these peripheral skills so as to be able to do them quickly OR accept what results I can come up with under the gun.

Even with a list of mistakes like that I still feel that I learned quite a bit. (Oh no...Here comes another list!)

1. ALWAYS inform the cruise director(spouse/significant other) of the schedule...Preferably more than two days in advance... Failure to comply with this edict can, and most likely WILL, cause you to be double-booked for activities.
2. Audio with SDL...Who knew it was so simple...
3. Comp. time is NOT a good time to try new software/hardware
4. Get sleep...Screwing up your normal schedule can just cost you more time.
5. Sound is nice...Though not NECESSARY...=/
6. Probably about a dozen more things that I can't remember right now...

Game Overview

Contaminate! was meant be a kind of cross between Othello/Go and Life. You(the Virus) would go around trying to surround and thereby infect the healthy Cells. The Anitgens would in turn try and surround either an infected Cell(and repair it) OR a Virus (to destroy it).
As a note, I DO plan on completing this game... Just need to recover a bit from the Comp.
All of the graphics were done in The GIMP, music was provided by recording and wave mixing(in Dexster) me playing on a Yamaha PSR-76. Music was then changed into an ogg file using oggenc. Code was built/compiled with GCC 3.2.2 on a Slackware distro.

Dev Box Specs

Gateway Solo 2500 (Laptop)
Pentium 233Mhz
160M RAM
2.4.22 Linux Kernel