Santa frowns to town postmortem

It's time to write a little postmortem about my LD43 entry.

This time I decided to skip using an existing engine and focus on using my own hand-made one codenamed Binocle. As usual this isn't a very good decision as it isn't a mature engine, but it's definitely a pleasure to work with. I've written it in from scratch in plain old C, using some common libraries like SDL and it gets the job done, but at the time I started coding the game it was still missing a lot of features.

I also wanted to settle for something with a Christmas vibe together with the compo theme, so I ended up with this "help Santa or the elves will be sacrificed" kind of play.

What went good

• coding with my own engine in plain C has been a pleasure. I didn't have to fight an existing engine that does a lot of stuff that I will never use
• I managed to get some decent graphics even though I'm no artist
• I liked that I managed to put at least one Christmas-themed song
• I managed to submit the game to the compo! yeah!

What went wrong

• using your own engine that hasn't been battle-tested before is going to be a problem as you will spend a lot of time implementing missing features and fixing engine's bugs
• I didn't have enough time for more music. I put together a quick main theme loop with Figure on the iPhone and that was it. I wish I had more time to compose a few longer background songs
• game mechanics are way too simple. I had to rush near the end and cut off a lot of ideas and ended up with this Santa moving back and forth and interacting with a few objects and that's it. I should have put at least some enemies to dodge and give a meaning to the jump ability
• compiling for cross-platform targets takes a lot of time. I had to fight with emscripten to build a runnable web version and resolve some obscure bugs that were happening on Windows but not on macOS (my main development platform)

Conclusion

In the end I think I will use my engine again in the future. But this time I want to get ready a new sprite animation system, some spatial has collision code and sprite batching to ease the CPU when spawning particles and the like. And of course some scrolling code.. I still need to finish the camera implementation. Next time I hope I will have enough time to focus on the gameplay rather than the engine though :)

Please try it out and leave a comment

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/santa-frowns-to-town