My game, Obscured Nonphysical Expanse, was a complete success in every way I would’ve thought possible. It’s a 3D ambient-horror puzzle game where you need to find your way out of a network of hallways that defy basic geometry, made in LWJGL and Java. I would’ve liked to have made the map a little bit bigger, but I’m still fairly proud of how much I got done.

Now, on to how everything died.

I finished the game about ten minutes before the competition ended, and then realized I had no idea how to pack my code and assets into a runnable game. Worked that out *relatively* quick, packed it into a .jar. At this point I had pretty much given up on web support until I had more time to port the game, tomorrow. So, I now had a lovely little .jar, spliced together using jarsplice and contained in a single file. Except it didn’t run, because the format doesn’t pack the resource files (images, sounds, models) in. So I spent a solid two hours trying to shift things around in my code and on my drive to make things work properly.

Nope.

Nothin’.

So, I’ve now given up. I posted the source code on my game page, but I can think of literally no other way in which this might work. I’m tired, sore, angry, and slightly hallucinating from over-exposure to the colour white, so I bit you all adieu and am now going to go eat curry and pass out. Maybe I’ll just ditch the whole effort of making this work for LD and turn it into a full game so that I can procrastinate learning how to pack files even longer and get even more frustrated when I can’t distribute my game…

Tags: post-mortem