This Ludum Dare felt like such a dream. There wasn’t much sleep to be had which probably contributed in part to it, but I also started late. I didn’t even get my “I’m In!” message up till after Ludum Dare had started. In the end, I didn’t even get a game finished and withdrew from the event at the very end. Mostly, this had to do with my inexperience with level creation and collision detection, things that I’ve been struggling with for a while, but havn’t yet completed outside of a jam.

Regardless, I learned plenty and did manage to get a somewhat simple map/level creation bit setup. It takes the pixels from a small image and in-turn uses the colors to generate something on the level/map that corresponds to that specific hexadecimal color. It took a bit of work and I learned a lot about bitmasking, but I lost all progress when creating my collision system. I understand how axis-aligned bounding boxes work and I’m familiar with spatial partitioning, but for whatever reason (I still havn’t sorted out the bugs), collision just isn’t happening. In fact, my scripts break and the whole game freezes up. Yay! I suppose I should have should have some fallthrough so things don’t completely halt if something breaks.

To make matters even worse, my game engine has some as of yet unidentified memory leak. While it’s not particularly awful (yet), I imagine after running for a while it’d be pretty detrimental. I’ve isolated it to a few functions and plan to fiddle with it in the weeks to come.

So where do I go from here? Well, after reading Rami Ismail’s post about making a game every week, I’ve decided that it would be interesting to give his ideas a try. After all, I already spend lots of time fiddling about with miniature projects. If I were to focus and aim to finish them within a weeks time and then start over on something new every week I’m sure I’d learn all sorts of things. Outside of game development fun I also want to start teaching myself PHP/SQL. I’ve been interested in working on back-end web development for a long time but I’ve been distracted with front-end stuff so much that I simply havn’t had the time. No longer! I’m going to try to take any extra time I have and devote it to learning some back-end stuff!

I know I can do this. I just need to focus.
If you’d like to see my various projects I’ll be writing about them on my website regularly.

Oh, oh! And to those of you who did complete your games: They’re lovely! They’re beautiful! I’ve seen some amazing submissions!
And those of you who didn’t make it in: I know it can make one feel down, but there is always next time and there’s always something to learn from this jam!
I love you all~