Mirrors was too ambitious since I started so late due to being sick on saturday. I only had the basics, platforming and pushing objects around, but without graphics and the main gameplay mechanic implemented, come monday morning even taking a few extra hours I couldn’t finish before I had work.<\/p>\n
What went well:<\/strong> Eventually we settled on a game involving 2 paralell universes where everything is slightly different, a ‘Mirror’ world, and you would solve puzzles by jumping back and forth through a mirror. <\/p>\n What went wrong:<\/strong> “if(player.x > 400){\/*do something*\/}” <\/p><\/blockquote>\n become <\/p>\n “if(player.getBody().getPosition().x > 400\/worldScale){\/*do something*\/}” <\/p><\/blockquote>\n this made debugging some things REALLY hard.<\/p>\n The other problem is that since I started so late, the theme was kinda difficult to implement in a timely fashion. The Concept that we came up with was definitely cool, and potentially something that could be finished in 2 days, but not if I start 24 hours late. The whole 2 worlds thing would increase development time, as making the levels would take twice as long, maybe longer if we wanted to make them slightly more interesting.<\/p>\n Lessons for next time:<\/strong>
\n The design only took an hour or so to talk out the game with the other 2 gentlemen I was working on it with. We brainstormed a bunch of Ideas, and eventually mashed a couple ideas together to get the final outcome. It was a good time too because we literally came up with a ton of ideas, some of which I may make in my free time. These Ideas ranged from “An Illusion oriented Tetris-Style game” where the blocks are only visible for a short time to, and i’m not kidding, “Hypno-Hooker” a game about hypnotizing people into believing you slept with them and while they are knocked out, placing evidence to make it believable.<\/p>\n
\n Instead of rolling my own physics engine, I decided to use Jbox2D, and I had to fight with it for a few hours just to get things to render due to it using Measurements like Meters instead of Pixels. Making logic like <\/p>\n
\n Im sure that next time i’ll have a better handle of Jbox2D which should help make things go smoother, but seriously losing 24 hours due to sickness really screwed me over, and sadly that is something I really can’t control. <\/p>","time":"January 15th, 2014 3:16 am","title":"Mirrors \u2013 Postmortem"}