{"author_name":"Ace","cat":"LD #25","comments":[],"epoch":1355755440,"likes":1,"metadata":{"p_key":"47705","p_author":"Ace","p_authorkey":"10247","p_urlkey":"83370","p_title":"MiLWaDS Post-Mortem","p_cat":"LD #25","p_event":"LD25","p_time":"1355755440","p_likes":"1","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"10247","us_name":"Ace","us_username":"ace","event_start":"1355443200","event_key":"14","event_name":"LD25"},"text":"<p>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.<\/p>\n <p>So MiLWaDS, or as it&#8217;s really called; &#8220;My Little World Domination Simulator&#8221;, don&#8217;t ask about the &#8216;i&#8217; and the &#8216;a&#8217;.<br \/>\n I was in luck about the theme choice because this is a game idea I&#8217;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&#8217;ll slowly but surely complete nefarious acts and villainous deeds on the road to complete global domination.<\/p>\n <p>Decided to again make my game in C++, because I figure that using a tool I&#8217;m comfortable with is better than using a simple tool that I&#8217;ve never used before. Plus, with building it in C++ I was able to use the Yarn engine I&#8217;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&#8217;s not forget SFML.<\/p>\n <p>Just like last time I was in my tools are;<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>Visual Studio 2010, for writing my C++ code.<\/li>\n <li>GIMP, for all my art.<\/li>\n <li>Blender, for 3d-modeling, even though I haven&#8217;t really needed them.<\/li>\n <li>Spotify, because music helps creativity for me.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>So some thoughts afterwards;<\/p>\n <p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n <p>What went well?<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>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.<\/li>\n <li>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.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>What went less well?<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>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.<\/li>\n <li>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.<\/li>\n <li>I ended up breaking Kunlaboro (An entity system I&#8217;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&#8217;t really want to try to get a clean clone done of it either.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p><img alt=\"MiLWaDS\" src=\"http:\/\/ace.haxalot.com\/pictures\/random\/zscreen\/My_Little_World_Domination_Simulator_2012-12-17_01-47-28.png\" \/><br \/>\n Play the game here: <a title=\"My Little World Domination Simulator\" href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-25\/?action=preview&amp;uid=10247\">http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-25\/?action=preview&amp;uid=10247<\/a><\/p>\n \n <p>Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/c\/\" rel=\"tag\">C++<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/compo\/\" rel=\"tag\">compo<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/final\/\" rel=\"tag\">final<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/ld25\/\" rel=\"tag\">ld25<\/a>, <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>, <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/screenshot\/\" rel=\"tag\">screenshot<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/sfml\/\" rel=\"tag\">sfml<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/windows\/\" rel=\"tag\">Windows<\/a><\/p>","time":"December 17th, 2012 9:44 am","title":"MiLWaDS Post-Mortem"}