I'll be doing a few short (my kind of short might still turn out to be rather long) Post-Mortem posts on the process of my jam entry.

I had an idea rather soon while taking a shower. (Showers are great for coming up with ideas, as are toilets.) The idea: Project a third person view to a side scrolling platformer to get an interesting mechanic for a puzzle game.

I was hesitant at first: How would I be able to implement this? The first idea was using a the depth-buffer (depth pixels) with a stencil buffer (adding extra information to pixels like this pixel is lava). But it would lead to a lot of small gaps and holes. Also a lot of different slopes. In addition to having to use the stencil buffer where not things I wanted to deal with during a jam.

What about tracing the depth buffer with polygons? A much better idea, but I decided I didn't want to spend a lot of time on reading ways to do that in real time.

How about raycasting the 3D world, and showing large pixels when geometry was found. I guess that would work, but it would skip geometry that was either small or far away.

But when I came up with the idea to use GameBoy-esque tiles as a way of representing the big pixels I chose to quickly prototype that last one, since I though it was easy.

It was. Great. But a bit more buggy than expected.

Realising this, and knowing I didn't have time to come up with something new, I decided I would focus on exploring the idea, rather than getting a perfect implementation. And focus on having fun more than getting the best scores on all categories.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/the-imaginary-room

I will do one more post-mortem on details a lot of people might miss (but why I did them anyways) and one on all the art assets I never used and perhaps one on my preparation (or how I stopped worrying and love Unity's lack of a proper level editor.)