I thought I’d make a post to mention a few things now that it’s all over.

This was my first Ludum Dare.  I’ve known about the competition for quite a long time now, even played some of the games in the past.  But I honestly never saw myself competing in it.  I didn’t think I could ever produce anything worth showing in just two days.  I get stuck on things sometimes (like collision detection), and then the little glitches bother me enough that I just stay focused on that one aspect until it’s completely sorted out, or lose all my sanity trying.  I don’t know if that’s being a perfectionist or just being stubborn, but either way, I never thought I’d compete in Ludum Dare because of such things.  I never even intended on competing this time, but at the last minute I thought it might actually be fun.  I’ve been staring at one particular project a lot lately, complex and 3D, and I figured it would be a nice break to do something simple.  And it’s good experience, if nothing else.

I ran into two snags along the way which held me up.  One was, surprise surprise, collision detection.  I’m using the box method, and when that’s not perfectly implemented then you run into a lot of issues of clipping through walls.  Depending on the problem, sometimes that presents itself as if no collision detection was there at all, or alternatively, getting ripped through the wall and spit out somewhere else across the map.  There would be times where I thought I’d fixed everything, but then a little annoying bug would show itself, and I kept going back to that same code.  Eventually I perfected it though, and I was pretty happy with that.  But I lost time nonetheless.

The other timesink was trying to make the game run as a Java applet.  I probably spent almost two hours on that before finally deciding to cut my losses.  I kept getting Java permission problems, regardless of self-signing the JARs.  I figured if this is how it’s going to act with just the default Java permission settings then it’s going to be just as bad for everyone else trying to use it.  I don’t know if it was something on my end or something with LWJGL (I saw reference to an issue similar to mine on a forum which was said would be fixed in a later version, so I dunno), but unfortunately I wasn’t able to have a web version.

The artwork took me a bit of time, and it changed along the way, but I would say that that was more just part of the regular development rather than being a problem.  I’m not an artist, but sometimes I manage to come up with something that I like.  I have to admit, I’m pleased with how it came out overall.

Other than the two frustrating issues of collision and applets, I actually had a lot of fun.  Having a time limit really pushes you to come up with code that just works for that specific purpose instead of thinking too far ahead and trying to make it more robust.   I guess that comes from the mindset of not wanting to rewrite code when you realize you need to add something in later.  But in this case that was fairly irrelevant.

I worked right up near the time limit, only quitting about ten minutes till so that I could package it up and upload it.  Since this was my first Ludum Dare, I wanted to be done and submitted by the actual deadline.  I realized there was an hour-long submission window, but I figured better safe than sorry.  The website got hit pretty hard too, so I’m glad I got mine in when I did.

As for the game itself, they always say that the sign of a good one is one that you enjoy playing yourself.   I honestly do enjoy floating around and shooting things.  I definitely think that it’s something I want to develop a bit further.  I wanted to add things like earthquakes, maybe rocks falling, taking damage when you fall or hit your head too hard (the HP system was added at the very last minute, so I barely got bats hurting you implemented!), more enemies (like spiders), a thrust bar (which you have to either replenish, or it regenerates, I’d have to try it), a title screen and game over condition, etc etc.  I wish I could have made a more complete game to submit for the contest, but I’m still pretty pleased with what I managed to accomplish.

I can say with confidence that I’ll be participating again.  It was a great experience, and as a master procrastinator, I can say that anything that motivates you to make something is worth involving yourself in!