{"author_name":"JoeCool17","cat":"LD #25","comments":[],"epoch":1355879340,"likes":3,"metadata":{"p_key":"47472","p_author":"JoeCool17","p_authorkey":"5160","p_urlkey":"83137","p_title":"Sir Cat postmortem","p_cat":"LD #25","p_event":"LD25","p_time":"1355879340","p_likes":"3","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"5160","us_name":"JoeCool17","us_username":"joecool17","event_start":"1355443200","event_key":"14","event_name":"LD25"},"text":"<p><img alt=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/compo2\/201083\/5160-shot0.png\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-content\/compo2\/201083\/5160-shot0.png\" \/><\/p>\n <p>Sir Cat postmortem<\/p>\n <p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n <p>Overall, I&#8217;m exceptionally happy with how this turned out. I took a near-complete leap of faith and used a bunch of new tools- new graphics editor, new development setup\/OS, new IDE, everything except the kitchen sink and the programming language\/library. I used the following new stuff this time around:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>Krita for Graphics Editing- I was so impressed with this that I&#8217;m no longer using anything else- this is really a great piece of work. Open source too!<\/li>\n <li>SPE for IDE- Admittedly I&#8217;ve been using python for the past few years and never fooled around with SPE. (Seems like a crime against nature, doesn&#8217;t it?) The tool did well, but the debugger doesn&#8217;t like lots of entities at once, so at a point I was forced to debug from the command line.<\/li>\n <li>Ubuntu- I&#8217;ve done a little bit of development on it, but nothing much at all, so this was a new experience for me as well. I&#8217;m never developing anything on anything else again, it was such a breeze on Linux. <img src=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-includes\/images\/smilies\/simple-smile.png\" alt=\":)\" class=\"wp-smiley\" style=\"height: 1em; max-height: 1em;\" \/><\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>The rest:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>Python<\/li>\n <li>Pygame<\/li>\n <li>Old code from LD23 (&#8220;Dreamworld,&#8221; if you&#8217;re interested.)<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>What went right: So much went right with this time &#8217;round that I can&#8217;t even begin to list all of them, but I&#8217;ll list a few, because I know you guys wanna know <img src=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-includes\/images\/smilies\/simple-smile.png\" alt=\":)\" class=\"wp-smiley\" style=\"height: 1em; max-height: 1em;\" \/><\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>Python- never lets me down, never gives me obscure pointer errors<\/li>\n <li>Graphics- Normally I&#8217;m relegated to glorified programmer art. Krita let me do a whole lot more, and I&#8217;m more than impressed with the results.<\/li>\n <li>Angular velocity- Learning trig in my math class, naturally I wanted to apply it, so I added angular velocity for the player and mice, and while through post-compo playtesting it now seems (to both me and the people who&#8217;ve commented on it) a little annoying, I think it really brings out the mice as an innocent &#8220;feather.&#8221; I like the effect.<\/li>\n <li>The idea: Normally my ideas are way too far out to reasonably complete in 48 hours. This was the first which I felt I&#8217;ve truely fulfilled in the best of my abilities given the time<\/li>\n <li>Goats: I added a goat- a laser goat made out of yarn attempting to take over the world- naturally.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>Where I found gremlins hiding:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>One short, confusing level- Many people I&#8217;ve shown the game to are confused as to how to win the game- I explain that there&#8217;s a sign that goes across the screen, but even then it seems too vauge&#8230;<\/li>\n <li>Misaligned text- I don&#8217;t like pygame&#8217;s text, it doesn&#8217;t let you specify &#8220;centered&#8221; or anything sane like that, so I had to guess as to positioning&#8230;<\/li>\n <li>Python\/Pygame: I think this will be (sadly) the last entry I make with python- I&#8217;ve hit upon many limits of it in making this game that wouldn&#8217;t be there on other platforms. It&#8217;s a great learning tool and really helped me get to this point though.<\/li>\n <li>Py2Exe: eeevil eeevil tool, I had to use python 2.5 (when Itanium was a thing and support for windows 9x was *starting* to look old&#8230;) to get a nice .exe for windows.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>Overall, I love how it turned out, will definitely be making a post-compo version, and who knows? Depending on how much positive input I get, I might just go all out with this one- That&#8217;s how much I love it.<\/p>\n <p>Finally, some advice to first-timers:<\/p>\n <p>If you think you didn&#8217;t do well, that you didn&#8217;t try, or anything negative, it&#8217;s not true. You just found out how *not* to make a game. This is my 5th LD, and the first which I think I actually did OK in- it took me a while to get it right, and it might take a little while for you too- just know that each time you do it, you get better, and not just by a little bit either. You start noticing yourself doing things you never thought you could do, or even dream of, during any normal time. LD is not a competition, it&#8217;s a learning experience. You don&#8217;t win LD, you learn by doing it, that&#8217;s what you take away from it. Hell, you just had some of the most productive 48 or 72 hours of your life- even if you didn&#8217;t finish, you still have (at least some of) the code, the art, and the idea- and most importantly, you worked hard on it and learned from it. You don&#8217;t get to be Notch without learning how to make a ton of separate, unrelated games. That&#8217;s the point of LD, and if you had fun, you won it.<\/p>\n <p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n <p>-JoeCool17<\/p>\n <p>Play and rate my entry here!\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-25\/?action=preview&amp;uid=5160\">http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-25\/?action=preview&amp;uid=5160<\/a><\/p>\n <p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n \n <p>Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/post-mortem\/\" rel=\"tag\">post-mortem<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/postmortem\/\" rel=\"tag\">postmortem<\/a><\/p>","time":"December 18th, 2012 8:09 pm","title":"Sir Cat postmortem"}