Now that I’ve had some time to rest I can look back on how this competition went. All in all I think it went brilliantly 😀

What went right:

• Having the entire weekend to dedicate to coding, previously I only watched Ludum Dare from the sidelines. This time I made an active decision to participate and was up and coding each day
• Having spent the past few weeks fooling around in Java I had learnt a lot of techniques to do user interfaces. It was easy to implement those methods as they were still fresh in my mind.
• Going and doing my own thing, namely simulations seemed to go really well. I have a huge amount of knowledge I’ve picked up over years about how to make a simple map generation algorithm.
• Having a proper IDE, using Netbeans was a real improvement from only having Notepad++. Its error highlighting was a huge benefit when sleepily coding at 11pm.
• Getting the map up and running pronto, I find it helps hugely to get feedback on what your code is doing so first thing I did was setup a barebones simulation and displayed it. Once I had it running happily away I could spend time thinking as I watched the simulation unfold.

What didn’t go as well:

• Using a language I was less familiar with, ideally I would have used Javascript but I was having too much fun with the modular nature of Java objects. This meant that I was writing code without knowing what a lot of the libraries did. It took me two hours to implement sprites! And even then it didn’t quite work right to begin with.
• Aspirations a little too lofty, making a full god game is a huge task, not to mention all the things I wanted to implement; trade, alliances, cultural identities! For a while I wondered if I’d get any proper functionality done at all and be left with a screen saver. Things worked out but I was coding the goto command and combat mere hours before the deadline.
• Simulation first, game second. It would have been good to spend more time on planning the user interaction with the program, most of the buttons and the intro text were done haphazardly at the last minute. I guess thats to be expected in a 48hr compo, still it was a shame to produce something so clearly incomplete.
• The theme of ‘Unconventional weapon’, I’ll confess to being a little disappointed with that as I wasn’t too keen on making a combat game. Its good that I was able to find motivation to do my own thing but magical powers are hardly unconventional in games… Perhaps if I had kept my options open on the run up to the theme announcement rather than focusing on what I wanted to make.

Still at the end of this Ludum Dare I’ve created something that is almost an actual, legitimate game. I even sat down to try playing it properly (hence the screenshot, 4.2K woo!) and found it pretty compelling. I don’t think I’ve ever finished a game project before so thanks Ludum Dare 😀