So after having worked on MiLWaDS for many (As many as 48 even) hours now, I feel like a short post-mortem might be useful.

So MiLWaDS, or as it’s really called; “My Little World Domination Simulator”, don’t ask about the ‘i’ and the ‘a’.
I was in luck about the theme choice because this is a game idea I’ve been wanting to make for a long time, a sort of demake of the world domination part of the RTS Evil Genius. Using the minions you gain through recruiting efforts you’ll slowly but surely complete nefarious acts and villainous deeds on the road to complete global domination.

Decided to again make my game in C++, because I figure that using a tool I’m comfortable with is better than using a simple tool that I’ve never used before. Plus, with building it in C++ I was able to use the Yarn engine I’ve been working on for university projects, which also lead to some interesting features being available that I had absolutely no use for. Full angelscript based script engine support and google breakpad exception handling among them, I did use other parts of it though. And SFML, let’s not forget SFML.

Just like last time I was in my tools are;

• Visual Studio 2010, for writing my C++ code.
• GIMP, for all my art.
• Blender, for 3d-modeling, even though I haven’t really needed them.
• Spotify, because music helps creativity for me.

So some thoughts afterwards;

What went well?

• I love the simple but still stylish color scheme I managed to create early on in the development process, simple dark-grey with cyan borders worked well and gave the game a sort of hollywood-hacking feel.
• Loading the data from basic csv style formats worked much better than I expected it to, at point I was hoping to instead save them with JSON but decided against that to save the time need to implement something like that.

What went less well?

• The agency system ended up having far too many parts that never got used, I delegated too much work to them in the design phase.
• I never got my minions fininshed completely, each minion was supposed to gain in strength when levling up them as well as being able to specialize in different abilities.
• I ended up breaking Kunlaboro (An entity system I’ve been working a bit on) enough that I had to add triply redundant error checking to most messages. Since I was low on time I didn’t really want to try to get a clean clone done of it either.

Play the game here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=10247

Tags: C++, compo, final, ld25, post-mortem, postmortem, screenshot, sfml, Windows