The good and the bad about “partial” Ludum Dare

All right. I finished my game last night and submitted it, but I had time on the bus and no wifi today, so I fixed some major bugs I found. I didn’t have a chance to get everything updated until now though. Aiyee! Hope it’s not a big deal. I would have submitted but I was without an Internet connection.

So what were these bugs?

1. The game loop didn’t reset properly. When you selected “Retry?” and said yes, the game state didn’t reset. So you kept on dying over and over again. Oops. Similarly, when you said “no”, the game thought you won. Whoops.

2. Enemy spawning, caused by innocent, but silly swapping of > and < symbols as well as missing parentheses. That's one of the things that I noticed last night and said, "Hmm something's wrong… but I guess it's still playable" but decided that it really needed to be repaired.

3. Okay, I added a secret, undocumented weapon. Press "3". (Yes, it has a ten second cooldown.) Unfortunately, it's not that useful. Oops.

Anyway – here it is! I hope you enjoy it.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-27/?action=preview&uid=22457

Okay, what’s the “bad” about partial Ludum Dare that isn’t a last-minute, finger? Well, besides the fact that I didn’t have the time to really get as much as I wanted done, I think the biggest thing I miss about not taking the entire time in a last-minute rush to hit the deadline for Ludum Dare is that adrenaline rush to see how much I can complete and crossing your fingers for that last compile and then getting the submission in 5 minutes before the deadline, and then sitting back and taking a deep breath about it all. The adrenaline rush was GREAT and I didn’t really get it as much this time, since I was able to submit and then think about it, and then work on it, and then submit some improvements rather than that feeling of “finality” where you submit and then you have to live with all of your mistakes!

Yeah I do kind of miss that feeling. Maybe next time. I’ll have to learn that real-time sound engine in Python next time!