{"author_name":"jahmaican","cat":"LD #30","comments":[],"epoch":1409071020,"likes":1,"metadata":{"p_key":"26516","p_author":"jahmaican","p_authorkey":"40987","p_urlkey":"61946","p_title":"Hot stuff, Cold stuff \u2013 LD 30 post mortem","p_cat":"LD #30","p_event":"LD30","p_time":"1409071020","p_likes":"1","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"40987","us_name":"jahmaican","us_username":"jahmaican","event_start":"1408665600","event_key":"24","event_name":"LD30"},"text":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/logo4.png\"><img class=\"size-full wp-image-387495 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/logo4.png\" alt=\"logo\" width=\"336\" height=\"96\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n <p>First game jam in my career done, resulting in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-30\/?action=preview&amp;uid=40987\">Hot and Cold<\/a>. Time for a summary! I&#8217;ll list what went right and what went wrong, just because everyone does it this way.<\/p>\n <h3>Hot stuff<\/h3>\n <ul>\n <li>Graphics.<br \/>\n Other than some stuff that I&#8217;ll mention later, I did a pro job here. Honestly, I don&#8217;t know a thing about drawing and art in general, so it was quite a challenge. I decided to go for a minimalistic look with 8&#215;8 pixel tiles and sprites &#8211; relatively easy and quick to make, not much detail is needed and can still look good. Credits for inspiration go to <a href=\"http:\/\/opengameart.org\/content\/8x8-tileset-by-soundlust\">this tileset<\/a> by Soundlust and the game I once enjoyed &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/gamejolt.com\/games\/rpg\/legends-of-yore\/5714\/\">Legends of Yor<\/a>e.<br \/>\n <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/scr.png\"><img class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-387580\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/scr-550x235.png\" alt=\"scr\" width=\"550\" height=\"235\" srcset=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/scr-300x128.png 300w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/scr-550x235.png 550w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/scr.png 730w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/a><\/li>\n <li>Animations.<br \/>\n There&#8217;s just a few of them, they&#8217;re all 3 or 4 frames long and the logic behind them is quite strange, but in my humble opinion they look really good. Especially destroying barrels is very eye-pleasing.<br \/>\n <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/Sprite-0003.gif\"><img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-387551\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/Sprite-0003.gif\" alt=\"Sprite-0003\" width=\"48\" height=\"48\" \/><\/a><\/li>\n <li>Aseprite.<br \/>\n Connected with the two above points, the software I used. As stated on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.libgosu.org\/cgi-bin\/mwf\/topic_show.pl?pid=7856#pid7856\">gosu forums<\/a> before, Aseprite is the only pixel art tool I don&#8217;t hate. I used old free 0.9.5 version for the compo, but I was happy to pay $10 earlier today for the newest version. It&#8217;s really good.<\/li>\n <li>Concept.<br \/>\n I was quite pleased the theme, but to be honest I would be happy with almost every one there was. In the final voting I upvoted more than a half of them, and downvoted only two. The idea of stwitching between worlds might not be very original, but it&#8217;s a good setup for a game and it was the first thing that came to my mind, so I just went with it. Of course, lots of planned features were dumped\/changed as time was passing, but the main point is there.<\/li>\n <li>Game mechanics.<br \/>\n There might be not much to it, they&#8217;re quite poorly coded and rather undertested, but I was very pleased to realize that they all seem to work OK. Maybe I just didn&#8217;t try hard enough, but at current state I wasn&#8217;t able to cause the game to crash or even find any major bugs (and I&#8217;m the person that is supposed to know all the code flaws).<\/li>\n <li>Blogging.<br \/>\n Okay, some of you might think it&#8217;s just a waste of precious time, but I found writing these short posts very helpful. I&#8217;d really recommend doing this, as it basically lets you think for a moment about what you&#8217;re doing, rate your progress and simply blow off some steam. Just take a look at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/category\/ld-30\/?author_name=jahmaican\">my journal<\/a>, it&#8217;s not too long, but there&#8217;s abundace of hilarity and drama.<\/li>\n <li>Exacly, drama.<br \/>\n Ludum Dare is just too much fun, drama and excitement. I was so glad when it was over, but I would (and I will) do it again. And again. And maybe once more.<\/li>\n <li>It&#8217;s a game.<br \/>\n Not much of a game, but it is. It has some kind of a a goal, and a win condition, and shit. So it&#8217;s a game by definiton. That makes it not <em>truely<\/em> complete, but the most complete game <em>I<\/em> ever created. Let me elaborate. I made <a href=\"http:\/\/gamejolt.com\/games\/shooter\/jcaster\/21407\/\">jCaster<\/a>, but it&#8217;s basically just an experiment (and it&#8217;s in development &#8211; very very slow development &#8211; for over a year now). I made &#8211; and finished &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/gamejolt.com\/games\/strategy-sim\/conway-s-game-of-life\/26682\/\">this pretty neat Game of Life implementation<\/a>, but as we all know (or should know) &#8211; GoL sadly does not fulfill any game definition known to humanity. I made some other projects that are not even worth mentioning. But yeah, my point is &#8211; last weekend I finally made a game. Deal with it.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <h3>Cold stuff<\/h3>\n <ul>\n <li>Time management.<br \/>\n I hesitated what should be number 1. on this list, but now I&#8217;m pretty sure it&#8217;s the right choice, because it&#8217;s the source of all further evil. I had 48 hours to make a game and I wasted more than a half of it. Looking back I don&#8217;t think I spent even 20 hours actually working. That means, I wasted at least 28 hours on sleeping, eating, drinking too much beer and making all the general stuff when all I had to do was <del>follow the damn train, CJ<\/del> to create a damn game. And I even failed to prepare a mind map, or a TODO list, or anything alike. I made myself disappointed.<\/li>\n <li>Levels.<br \/>\n There&#8217;s the tutorial that you can go through in less than one minute (I finished it like 20 minutes before compo ended). And that&#8217;s the only thing that a regular player can see in game besides main menu. So yeah, not much in terms of gameplay. And that&#8217;s the main direct reason why my entry is rather disappointing (or a complete faliure, if you prefer).<\/li>\n <li>Code redundancy.<br \/>\n That&#8217;s something very specific that makes me not sleep very well at night ever since. I can&#8217;t understand how I could think it&#8217;s a good idea to load every level from 4 different files and store the data in (wait for it) 7 (<em>seven!<\/em>) arrays. Okay, to be honest I know how &#8211; I had 2 different ideas to approach this matter and ended up mixing them. I did not fix this for, how I happened to think of it at the moment, simplicity (sic!) sake. But still, that&#8217;s just one example.<\/li>\n <li>Code in general.<br \/>\n Yeah, even though I&#8217;m known of hacking the hell outta every single line of code I come into contact with, I believe this might be the ugliest source I&#8217;ve ever produced. Mixed conventions (or no conventions whatsoever), chaos, devious logic that even I won&#8217;t be able to understand after a while and everything is hardcoded. Still, it&#8217;s some kind of fail\/win situation, because as mentioned above, it turned out to work quite decently. But don&#8217;t read it, especially if you want to become (or already are) a good programmer.<\/li>\n <li>No debugger.<br \/>\n One of the reasons for the two above. You know, I love writing in Ruby. And I love using Komodo Edit. The problem is, there is no good free Ruby IDE with a debugger (I think there&#8217;s Aptana Studio available, but it was crashing on my PC when I tried it some time ago). Komodo is a really lovely editor, but it&#8217;s <em>only<\/em> an editor, a fancier Notepad. I&#8217;d love to own Komodo IDE, but $90 for a personal licence, seriously guys&#8230; Anyway, of course there&#8217;s always an option of debugging in command line, but I never really used it, so it would probably be slower than searching for mistakes by reading the sources backwards and underwater. So there was no debugging involved at all.<\/li>\n <li>Lowering standards.<br \/>\n The game was supposed to have<\/p>\n <blockquote><p>&#8220;pretty complicated levels, not only with fires and barrels but also water, lava, rocks, guards and stuff&#8221;<br \/>\n &#8211; myself<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <p>I think we all know what happened <img src=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-includes\/images\/smilies\/simple-smile.png\" alt=\":)\" class=\"wp-smiley\" style=\"height: 1em; max-height: 1em;\" \/><\/li>\n <li>Message window.<br \/>\n Or the big ugly sign. You know what I&#8217;m talking about. This thing:<br \/>\n <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/screen8.png\"><img class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-383374\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/screen8-550x309.png\" alt=\"screen\" width=\"550\" height=\"309\" srcset=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/screen8-300x168.png 300w, http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/screen8-550x309.png 550w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n It&#8217;s hideous and I know it, because it was supposed to be just a temporary placeholder. And it happened to stay there. (To some extent the same could be said about main menu background, except it&#8217;s not <em>that<\/em> ugly.)<\/li>\n <li>Effects.<br \/>\n Or no effects at all. You know, lights, shadows, particles etc. I wanted to have at least some kind of cool transition effect between dimensions, but again it was something killed by priorities.<\/li>\n <li>Music.<br \/>\n I had <a href=\"www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/2014\/08\/23\/decisions-decisions-3\/\">an opportunity<\/a> of at least trying to create something, but my decision, decision was I&#8217;d rather sleep. So then there was no other option than generating soundtrack in <a href=\"http:\/\/codeminion.com\/blogs\/maciek\/2008\/05\/cgmusic-computers-create-music\/\">cgMusic<\/a>. The actual levels themes &#8211; you know, the ones you will never hear &#8211; are pretty nice in their generic way. And then there&#8217;s this absurd march I decided to play in tutorial <img src=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-includes\/images\/smilies\/simple-smile.png\" alt=\":)\" class=\"wp-smiley\" style=\"height: 1em; max-height: 1em;\" \/><br \/>\n And you know what, I was lying about the &#8220;you will never hear&#8221; part. Level 1-4 music is included with game files (in <em>levels<\/em> directory).<\/li>\n <li>Travels.<br \/>\n <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/2014\/08\/24\/its-nice-to-go-travling-no-its-not\/\">Would not recommend.<\/a><\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>So here you go. That&#8217;s all I can think of at the moment. Again, I&#8217;d like you to check out <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-30\/?action=preview&amp;uid=40987\">Hot and Cold<\/a>. It&#8217;s not all bad, and at the very least you won&#8217;t waste too much of your time on it <img src=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-includes\/images\/smilies\/simple-smile.png\" alt=\":)\" class=\"wp-smiley\" style=\"height: 1em; max-height: 1em;\" \/> I&#8217;m thinking of eventually making a post-compo version to actually finish what I started.<\/p>\n <p>Tomorrow I wish I will finally start looking at other people&#8217;s entries. Sadly, I&#8217;m just one guy and I can&#8217;t rate all the games out there. So if you specifically want to hear my opinion, feel free to ask, I&#8217;ll be happy to give one! (especially to a person who was not bored to read this far :))<\/p>\n <p>Damn that&#8217;s one long post.<\/p>\n \n <p>Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/postmortem\/\" rel=\"tag\">postmortem<\/a><\/p>","time":"August 26th, 2014 11:37 am","title":"Hot stuff, Cold stuff \u2013 LD 30 post mortem"}