Finally, I could sumbit the game of mine and my team (nothing official, just group of classmates and good friends). It’s our first ‘big’ LD entry. We’ll be glad if you will play the game .And I have some thoughts about the process and future reminds that I want to share with you.

What went right:

•  Lots of sleep – I had read some postmortems here and I obeyed them in this point. Coding 8~10 hours a day deserves a proper rest.
•  No fatal bugs – except one. My advice: when you have not much time, cheat while coding. Passing a globally defined object as a function parameter instead of pointer to it is bullshit unless your destructor is not destroying anything and I had to learn this the hard way. If your not sure, dont do crap like that and benefit from globally defined object and don’t pass them as parameters.
•  Clear idea – before jam started I wanted to do something including gravitation as a training for some future physics engine. And while brainstorming, that idea grapped my teammates as well, so we came up with the concept quite fast.
•  Level editor inside game itself – brave idea to mess code even more with implementing level editor and failsafes so nobody can access it without really knowing how to activate it. But it worked and saved alot time. And designer could test his level on the fly.
• TODO listing – I dont have a clue how other teams deals with that one. Our team communicated only via Skype, so the tasking others to something could be lost forever in some fiery conversation. My solution came up a few days before the jam, when I coded simple tasking system in php and put it online. Anyone could submit tasks for himself or the others, mark them as completed or delete them. TODO lists are good, they motivate people and we really used that.

What went wrong:

•  Lazyness – I don’t mean to offend anyone. I know my friends, they always wait for the last moment to do and submit their tasks. I just didn’t realize that the same it will be when making games. Textures, levels were made in last couple of hours before deadline. Music was created by accident when I discovered earslap.com (doplnit referenci) and sounds are only debug. Also some features like portals and pickable bonuses were not added before nobody told me, what it should really do and I wanted rather smaller but finished game.
•  Hardcoding – after almost four years I code games (including harsh begginings with realtime snake in command line and turn based fps dungeon crawler also in CMD) I really cannot write code prepared to be later updated with some modules like start and end level messages. And the code, pretty and clean at the start, ends up in total mess of dirty patches allowing me to display something for 3 seconds before loading next level. And that really sucks.
•  Distraction – really don’t play any silly webgame like Shakes and Fidget simultaneosly with coding 😉

TL;DR Takeaway:

•  DO – Sleep alot; make TODO lists; implement developer tools like editor inside game itself.
•  DONT – Work with people you know they have problems with deadlines even if they are your friends; don’t do hardcoding patches and thing you’re not sure of

I don’t know if I still have morale to continue polishing and upgrading game after Jam. I have some ideas that need to be iterated first or how to rebuild the game completely but at this point even adding Options and Help in main menu would require to start from scratch and rewrite tons of patches. I need feedback and support from you guys. If you like the game and think it would be awesome to continue with development of it, tell me, I will highly apreciate it.