I decided to go with a different technology than my usual Java2D applet game.  I was tired of the performance and sound issues that would always appear at the last minute.

I spent most of the time today trying to implement a platform game using Panda3D but I couldn’t get satisfactory results from the collision utilities.  The camera and the player would jitter all over the place.  The player wouldn’t slide off the platforms nicely, whatever combination of solids I tried.  Perhaps I should have spent more time with the engine before this weekend.  At the very least I could have learned that what I’m trying to achieve isn’t feasible.

Having wasted half the day on Panda3D I switched to javascript and canvas.  This comes with its own issues of course.  Pixel art looks awful when scaled and there doesn’t seem to be a way of avoiding the interpolation that takes place short of prescaling all images.  So I’m using larger vector based graphics drawn in Inkscape and exported as pngs.  You can see the results above.

I am a little behind but I have a working mechanic, working collision, a conceit that fits the theme and I’m fairly happy with the graphics I’ve clumsily cobbled together so far.