{"author_name":"TheMonsterFromTheDeep","cat":"LD #31","comments":[],"epoch":1418172480,"likes":1,"metadata":{"p_key":"22252","p_author":"TheMonsterFromTheDeep","p_authorkey":"45764","p_urlkey":"57619","p_title":"Post-compo thoughts","p_cat":"LD #31","p_event":"LD31","p_time":"1418172480","p_likes":"1","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"45764","us_name":"TheMonsterFromTheDeep","us_username":"\/author\/themonsterfromthedeep\/","event_start":"1417737600","event_key":"26","event_name":"LD31"},"text":"

There is a lot that went right, but even more that went wrong with my game, Peaceful Night<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"PeacefulNightScreenshot\"<\/p>\n

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\u00a0had to do (such as play audio loops).<\/p>\n

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:
\n 1) It was not very fun and hard to play.<\/p>\n

2) Resizing the window causes lots of lag.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Now, the one good thing is that I managed to make a walkcycle that doesn’t look terrible. I normally can’t do that.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

If you haven’t played and voted, I would love it if you did, even if you rate it 1 star!<\/p>","time":"December 9th, 2014 7:48 pm","title":"Post-compo thoughts"}