{"author_name":"metadept","cat":"LD #26","comments":[],"epoch":1367199420,"likes":1,"metadata":{"p_key":"43376","p_author":"metadept","p_authorkey":"15489","p_urlkey":"79012","p_title":"\u2018Be Still\u2019 Retrospective","p_cat":"LD #26","p_event":"LD26","p_time":"1367199420","p_likes":"1","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"15489","us_name":"metadept","us_username":"metadept","event_start":"1366934400","event_key":"16","event_name":"LD26"},"text":"

This turned out to be a very fun and interesting Ludum Dare for me, and I took a very different approach from the past two that I’ve participated in. I had a few ideas for various themes, but nothing for the one that was chosen, of course! So, I spent Friday night just thinking up concepts, didn’t write any actual code until Saturday morning, took lots of breaks, and focused on tweaking details rather than adding features. I’m pretty happy with the result, though I’m not sure how others will like it:<\/p>\n

Be Still<\/a><\/h2>\n
\"Yep,<\/a>

Yep, it’s minimal.<\/p><\/div>\n

I drew the character and other sprites in Paint.NET, built a simple skeletal animation using Spine (which is great, but I had a hard time exporting with clean borders on my images), then put it all together with a mash of Crafty JS and some extra jQuery\/CSS bits. Compared to developing in XNA (as I have in the past) this made it much easier to get something up and running and to tweak it quickly.<\/p>\n

I think my greatest success this time was picking a VERY simple concept to start with, then spending time on the details and fussing around. Compared to my previous entries, this one has a lot more polish.<\/p>\n

Conversely, my biggest lack was content. I could have been more ambitious, spent an extra 6 hours coding, and come out with a deeper player experience. Guess this will have to wait for a post-compo version… Practicing with my tools beforehand would also have been a good idea, but being comfortable with JavaScript and DOM manipulation in general gave me a pretty solid foundation at least.<\/p>\n

Now it’s time to play some games, and see what great ideas the rest of you came up with!<\/p>","time":"April 28th, 2013 8:37 pm","title":"\u2018Be Still\u2019 Retrospective"}