The following is a summary and post mortem for our new LD27 game 10 Second Dungeon Hero. We hope you enjoy playing it.

Entry Information

So I have never written one of these before so here it goes.

This was our third, and when I say our, it is me and my three boys (6, 9, 11) and my wife. I usually do all of the coding, and the rest of the family helps with the artwork.

This was the MOST challenging and the MOST satisfying LD yet. Why? Because I wanted to QUIT half way thru the contest. At one point on Sunday I had major bugs in the code and it seemed hopeless. But, something made me want to see this finished. So I took a break for a couple of hours, and came back with a clearer mind. It really helped and we have the results to show for it.

This was by far the most ambitious game we have done. I had NO idea how much work it is to create a random dungeon crawler. Well, now I know.

The Good

1. The Story — we had fun coming up with the story of Granny and her kids getting sent to another dimension. And having her BLAST their way back home.
2. Game — I am really proud of the game, not just for the reasons mentioned above, but also because it is a really large complex game that is “mostly” complete.
3. Hi Scoring — my goal for this LD was to use Scoreoid for tracking the hiscores and playing of the game. Mission accomplished.
4. Theme — we really liked the theme and we had lots of ideas before coming up with the dungeon crawler. In hind sight, my wifes idea for a balloon popping game would have been MUCH EASIER. (note: play the game and you will see we still worked the balloons in)
5. Random Room Name Generator — eash room you enter has a unique name. By far one of my most favorite features of the game. I got the inspiration from this article  that had a python random room generator, but I could not locate the code, so I rolled my own. I think it turned out nice.

The Bad

1. Map — the random map TOOK FOREVER to program. I think the end results look good but the code has SO MANY magic numbers it makes my head spin. Lesson learned.
2. Graphics — don’t get me wrong. The kids did a great job. But to take our games to the next level we need to step it up a bit.

The Ugly

1. Testing — once again last minute testing caused some delay near the deadline. Of course, I blame my children who were responsible for all Q&A. Its really hard to find good help these days.
2. Bugs — Grrr. Had some very nasty bugs in the shooting and level building that cost me many hours of programming.

Thats about it. Hope you enjoy it, and don’t forgot to play lots of games and rate them all.

Team Hocker