Howdy,

I just finished my first ever Ludum Dare entry! I wrote a game called “Lemon vs Lime” in 3 days with Java using the Eclipse IDE, the artwork was done in Paint.NET, you can play/rate here!

So I suppose I’ll write one of those what I did wrong, and what I did right posts! Let’s start off with what I did wrong…

What I did wrong!

• Timing: I actually spent the final day trying to rush as much as I could since I had unplanned events, I also woke up pretty late after working on the game for the night. I suppose I should have just stuck to a normal sleeping schedule.
• Graphics: I’m pretty appalling at graphics, although I have 3 talented artists in my game dev team, they we’re all busy during the jam
• Gameplay: A few aspects of the gameplay I’m not exactly happy with. You can pretty much play lazily and just sit in the corner and spray, this also leads to a crash since the amount of entities spawned is massive and there is pretty much no way I can think of fixing that, I did try to fix this issue though.
• Controls: I’m pretty terrible at implementing controls, for the time frame given I think I did okay, but when it comes to jumping physics I can never get anything perfect
• Collision Detection: I despise implementing collision detection, it’s pretty easy to add it only took a few lines of code, but the collision is a bit “iffy” and you can jump through walls. If I would’ve spent longer implementing AABB collision detection or something it might have worked out a bit better.
• Theme: I feel that the theme was pretty easy to make a game with since it’s something about an aspect changing in 10 seconds, or having to complete something in 10 seconds. My original idea was pretty different to the final game, it was supposed to be every 10 seconds the game evolves and you get a new weapon and the first level with be set in say caveman time, and then the second level would be set in medieval dates, and so on. Unfortunately, we actually came up with this idea halfway after I’d written every so it wasn’t really feasible to implement since it’s a complete re-write for the games mechanics/gameplay and we’d also have to redo all the artwork.
• Weapons: I’ll make this one quick since I’ve just written a paragraph for the last item… there weren’t enough weapons! I could easily add more but I just never got round to it. Sorry

What I did right!

• Code: I’m quite happy with how the code turned out, I’ve written quite a few games so I knew how to implement state system, entity hierarchies, collision detection and so on and I encountered near to no bugs when I wrote the game.
• Performance: The performance isn’t exactly amazing, but considering I was using Java’s Graphics API and I can pull off a smooth 30fps on my netbook, I was pretty happy.
• Gameplay: I really enjoy playing games that are pretty difficult (I wanna be the guy, Super Meat Boy, The Worlds Hardest Game… etc) and the fact that I wanted to make one and it actually ended up being pretty difficult is great. Although I think I went a little hard on the player, either that or I suck at my own game, haha.
• Timing: Other than spending my final day visiting my dad, I pumped out game mechanics pretty easily in the first day or so of development… but as they say “the last 10% of the product takes 90% of the time”.
• Tools: I am quite confident with the tools I used, I know how to use them and I think I can use Eclipse quite efficiently, but of course, I still have a lot more to learn about using Eclipse.

So that’s about it, I’ve finished my first game, I’ve written a giant analysis of the game and that’s it. I will definitely be participating in the next Ludum Dare (unless I have school or work or something comes up). I really enjoyed making a game it’s a great learning experience and pretty fun too.

Here’s a screenshot of the game:

The final version of Lemon vs Lime.

And you can play it here.