Well, second game ever. http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/26066

Here are some thoughts on the compo

The good:
As the compo got closer, I start to spitball ideas for game mechanics. (panels in the same scene, energy generators for object creation, rpg with fight sequences). The rpg was quickly out when I read all of your advice/tips for LD. I focused mainly on the panel jumping idea because it seemed to be the easiest. When I saw the final round of voting on Friday, I started trying to apply game ideas to all of them. That way I would be able to start coding at 9pm.

I was able to come up with 16 game ideas for 16 of the themes, all focused on the panel hopping. I would suggest to anybody trying to do this for the first time to come up with some ideas and see if you can apply those ideas to many of the themes just by tweaking the graphics.

I made a complete game in 48 hours. That is pretty amazing when you think about it

The bad:
The points mechanics are somehow getting messed up. You should only be getting 10-100 points per level, but it is printing the number you got on the levels and the total number back to back (i.e. 10 on the level on 100 total prints out as $10100) – I didn’t have time to figure out why it was doing that, but I think it was creating a text string instead of just adding numbers.

I had a safety teleport so people wouldn’t get stuck on a level. It was causing a lot of bugs where you would fall into the earth on the next panel or appear and not be able to move. I had to just scrap it and make a quick reload button.

Animations – I would have liked to have animated the guy kicking over the stalagmites, but ran out of time.

Artwork – I spent very little time on the artwork because I wanted a complete playable game. Maybe this was good, maybe bad.

The level complete scene – The level complete was supposed to have jewels and objects appearing in it based on your money. But with the total money messed up (above), I just went with higher and higher bills were coming in. This was even messed up because the amount of bugged money you collect on level 1 is enough to pay for all of the bills throughout the game. So people don’t see a point in continuing since they’ve already collected tons of money.

Chuck

Tags: journal, postmortem