{"author_name":"manabreak","cat":"LD #29","comments":[],"epoch":1398667860,"likes":1,"metadata":{"p_key":"30567","p_author":"manabreak","p_authorkey":"11177","p_urlkey":"66042","p_title":"Oh My Oilrig! \u2013 Early postmortem","p_cat":"LD #29","p_event":"LD29","p_time":"1398667860","p_likes":"1","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"11177","us_name":"manabreak","us_username":"manabreak","event_start":"1398384000","event_key":"22","event_name":"LD29"},"text":"

(Try it out at\u00a0http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-29\/?action=preview&uid=11177<\/a> !)<\/p>\n

Last night, I was quite tired and decided to call it ‘done’. The first thing this morning, I checked the comments and saw a crash notice… Great. Well, turned out to be a really small thing in the end. Now, time for an early post-mortem!<\/p>\n

The first thing that comes to my mind is that I should have done a lot more work during the first 24 hours. I slacked, doing about 8 hours of work, and it backfired on Sunday. I had planned for tons of features (namely, more enemies, more defenses, and a repair function for defenses), but as time went by, I had to scrap most of them and focus to get single things to work.<\/p>\n

The second problem was that while I had laid out the basic code design in my head before I started coding, it didn’t work out as intended. In the end, I had to write exceptions and exceptions of exceptions in order to get everything to work – not something you’d like to see in your code, especially if you’re going to maintain it later on. Some things were fixed so delicately that after I saw them finally working (for example, the way workers enable turrets to be built), I was afraid to touch the code so I wouldn’t break it again.<\/p>\n

On a more positive note, I surprised myself at how quickly I was able to make the graphics and sounds. In total, I probably used about three hours drawing the graphics, and about an hour making the music and sound effects. Granted, there’s not that many sound effects involved, but still. \":)\"<\/p>\n

One thing I especially liked about was the water. I’ve always struggled with animating water, or even creating nice-looking, non-animated water. This time, I used just single-colored, semi-transparent blue planes, stacked and slightly animated to move up and down and rotate a bit. I was surprised how well it worked considering how simple it was!<\/p>\n

So, what have I learned?<\/p>\n