This sucks, but I won’t be able to complete my game for the ludum dare 28. To be honest, I have enough to complete the game, but there is still too much work to do, and I don’t think I’ll be able to complete a game I’ll be happy of. Last edition I posted a game that I felt was very incomplete, and regretted it. This time I prefer not to push myself if I don’t feel the end result is worth it.

I wish I could blame something or someone for my failure to meet the deadline, but I have to blame only myself. I wasn’t prepared for the quirks of the Game Maker Language, and I spent too much time on things that didn’t matter. This leaded to me getting tired over useless things and making mistakes over and over, basically making me go backwards instead of foward, since I was fixing bugs for stuff I didn’t actually need for the end game. I feel a little silly to share this, but it may be useful for someone else. I tried implementing a script that would allow me to do some interesting transformations with fonts. In the end I ended up scrapping that mechanic because it wasn’t necessary and it would have required me more time to create, meaning I ended up with an engine with a custom string visualization routine.

Yeah, I basically rewrote draw_text. And on top of that, I had to hammer my head on the wall a few times because it was quite buggy and inefficient too. So I spent almost all of the first day on that, meaning that I was back on everything else. Today I realized there was just too much to do still to actually create something worthwhile, so here I am. I quit.

It feels like a sore defeat. But it’s all learning experience. For this time around I quit, but next time I’ll be stronger and more prepared.

I still have some time to pull together something for the jam, so I may try to quickly put something together, just to sweeten the pill a bit.