Know thy tools......

Well that was my first LD48 and boy, was it a learning experiance (sadly not enough XP to put me up a level though :)

• +: python: Way easy to code up the classes and stuff.

• +: pygame: Very nice wrappers for sdl (but.....)

• -: pygame: It has some very odd behaviours that are not obvious from the docs. (Eg, color_key and alpha channel stuff dont mix.)

• -: know thy toolkit: Id only started playing with pygame the week before and boy did it show once I really started.

• -: graphics: I should have listened to my own advice and ignored the graphics and get the gameplay done first.

Yes, pygame is a plus and a minus. My time to get something appearing on the screen was very short. My time to get what I _wanted_ on the screen was very long. Infact too long.

Being able to write a short program to draw a transparent object to the screen a day before the comp, doesnt mean you knock up a library to blat it ontop of a colorkey'ed tile surface during the comp. :)

I spent most of the sunday day (pretty well the whole thing) trying to get the graphics working. I should have abandononed it as soon as I had problems and got my game play going. Im sure people would have been more forgiving of a program with crap graphics and _SOME_ gameplay than they would be with my current entry, which has graphics but no gameplay. sigh. Annoyingly my idea would have worked fine just with 2D draw commands and I should have just bitten the bullet and gone with that ;).

The only current bit of game play is to fire up an editor and edit the level files at `data/maps/level0` although you might also need to nuke the `data/maps/level0.calc` file after you do. Currently only 'M'arine spawns do much of anything (give out light and thats it). Thrilling, isnt it? :)

Oh well, next time.... ;)