There is a lot that went right, but even more that went wrong with my game, Peaceful Night.

The first thing that greatly affected my game was the genre, which is pretty obvious. I chose to make a 2D sandbox game, and although I did an OK job, it was simply too ambitious, especially considering that I had never done a few of the things I had to do (such as play audio loops).

The second thing was my extremely dumb decision to make it so that the game screen never is drawn larger than the default resolution. I was probably tired and not thinking straight, and then I didn’t really think about resizing afterwards. This resolution issue caused two problems:
1) It was not very fun and hard to play.

2) Resizing the window causes lots of lag.

Speaking of dumb decisions, although I am a novice graphics programmer and don’t really quite understanding how painting the screen works and stuff, I can say with some certainty that it’s a bad idea to force the screen to repaint every 10 ms. I’m also pretty sure that basically nullifies any reason to use a buffer for the graphics.

There were also a few other things I shouldn’t have done, such as prioritize higher-memory processes over lower-memory processes.

I also don’t really know the best way to do game loops in Java, so I hoped that using timers would be good enough.

Finally, because this idea was so ambitious, and I couldn’t implement any enemies, there is basically nothing to do other than try to figure out what the crafting recipes are.

Now, the one good thing is that I managed to make a walkcycle that doesn’t look terrible. I normally can’t do that.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with my game. Although it didn’t turn out too well, I think it was OK for 48 hours, considering that I had never programmed some of the things in it before (such as an inventory GUI).

If you haven’t played and voted, I would love it if you did, even if you rate it 1 star!