{"author_name":"Vytheros","cat":"LD #29","comments":[{"author_name":"quantumpotato","time":"May 14, 2014 6:55 pm","epoch":1400111700,"text":"IMHO Sublime’s an excellent text editor. You can save your files and then run with command line.","spam":"N"}],"epoch":1398789900,"likes":1,"metadata":{"p_key":"30201","p_author":"Vytheros","p_authorkey":"26487","p_urlkey":"65672","p_title":"The Ice Pond is finished\u2026","p_cat":"LD #29","p_event":"LD29","p_time":"1398789900","p_likes":"1","p_comments":"1","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"26487","us_name":"Vytheros","us_username":"vytheros","event_start":"1398384000","event_key":"22","event_name":"LD29"},"text":"

My name is Brian Ash and I made a game for the Ludum Dare #29 Jam portion. I know it’s not post-mortem yet but I still want to talk about my experiences with Ludum Dare and what I feel like I could do for next time.<\/p>\n

If you haven’t played The Ice Pond yet, go check it out here<\/a><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

Looks pretty dreary, right?<\/p><\/div>\n

So first things first, I am never making a text-based adventure game ever again.<\/span><\/h2>\n

What I mean by this is never, I had so many difficulties with the command base that in the end I had to narrow it down to the point where you couldn’t experiment. I also used functions to refer to areas and get it inside one larger function, making it more stressful when I wanted to call something outside of the function.<\/p>\n

It could be that I decided to code it in Python, a language I have had little experience in, although my only options past Python were Visual Basic 2010 which I am not fond of or just not doing Ludum Dare.<\/p>\n

Due to my choice of Python, and my limited knowledge, I had about 70% of my code be ‘print’ on a single line to leave spaces between sentences. I also had to spend the last hour I had aligning the text with the console, just so you could read it.<\/p>\n

Secondly, that writing a cohesive story and coming up with humour is difficult.<\/span><\/h2>\n

Most of the humour in the game was written in a sleepy haze during the second day and I had no sleep by that point so I wasn’t 100% there when I wrote it. Most of it gave a short-lived chuckle but past that it didn’t really help. In addition, most of it was only funny to me and the people I’m friends with as we all have similar tastes in humour so yeah.<\/p>\n

Finally, what to do next time.<\/span><\/h2>\n

Hopefully by then I will have gotten a lot better at Python, enough that I can at least use pygame and a better editor than Sublime Text, something as advanced as Eclipse.<\/p>\n

Next time I might try to focus more on the story and have a simple gameplay system, one that’s easy to understand and master, whilst also adding a bit of a challenge. I feel like with a text-based game, you need to focus on both whereas I not great with gameplay, if given the time to plan, I could get a good story done.<\/p>\n

Hopefully by Ludum Dare 30 I might have convinced some friends to help me, as one of them writes and another is learning Python as well.<\/p>\n

I hope that everyone has a great 3 weeks worrying about rankings and see you all at Ludum Dare 30 \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n

 <\/p>","time":"April 29th, 2014 11:45 am","title":"The Ice Pond is finished\u2026"}