{"author_name":"ethankennerly","cat":"LD #25","comments":[],"epoch":1355721360,"likes":0,"metadata":{"p_key":"47778","p_author":"ethankennerly","p_authorkey":"3040","p_urlkey":"83443","p_title":"Sleeping Dragon: Post-mortem","p_cat":"LD #25","p_event":"LD25","p_time":"1355721360","p_likes":"0","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"3040","us_name":"ethankennerly","us_username":"ethankennerly","event_start":"1355443200","event_key":"14","event_name":"LD25"},"text":"
\"Sleeping<\/a>

Ludum Dare 25<\/p><\/div>\n

http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-25\/?action=preview&uid=3040<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What went right:<\/p>\n

Simple reference game:\u00a0 Friday at 6pm, Dave Alleca showed me Spike: A Love Story.\u00a0 Press a space bar to drop a spiked ceiling onto a passerby.\u00a0 It was simple to play, and the animation, sound, and writing was polished.\u00a0\u00a0 I managed my scope.<\/p>\n

Simple reference art:\u00a0 There’s many illustrations of dragons, peasants and knights to borrow from.\u00a0 I enjoyed referring to these and composing some cartoon characters.\u00a0 Cartoons are easy to make in Flash.\u00a0 Most everything was morphed from an oval.\u00a0 I felt relaxed on Saturday evening as I illustrated and animated.<\/p>\n

Pace:\u00a0 Almost every hour I committed<\/a> to git.\u00a0 I logged<\/a> each hour.\u00a0 I was aware of the time left and the goal for the hour.\u00a0 The log motivated me and balanced my perspective for the next time I make a game quickly.\u00a0 I took a break most hours; that was part of the rhythm.\u00a0 I slept eight hours each night.\u00a0 I was never exhausted, even though I did work 10 hours on Friday before starting the Ludum Dare at 6pm.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What went wrong:<\/p>\n

Over invested in infrastructure.\u00a0 I used Flixel.\u00a0 For such a simple game, next time I might go with native Flash.\u00a0 I was concerned about performance, yet the walking animations still had a little bit of stutter in them in Flixel.\u00a0 I used a scene movieclip to compose the elements and to sync the sound with the visuals, and to dynamically generate sprite sheets from the animations.<\/p>\n

Nice to have polishing before essential requirements.\u00a0 I had planned to add fireball since the beginning, but I did not start programming it until about 2 or 3 hours before the end.\u00a0 Until that moment I could not consider the difficulty.\u00a0 Afterward, I made the fire and bite more deadly, but enabled a dominant strategy to pace fireballs.<\/p>\n

Indecision.\u00a0 I over-invested and polished because I was not sure about how much time I would need and wanted to have a well-rounded game.\u00a0 I put off adding more features because I wanted to polish what was already there.\u00a0 I was not too clear about my goals.\u00a0 I was not sure about blitting or vector art, about using particles or custom animation.\u00a0 So I made both.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Altogether I enjoyed the experience and have been encouraged by the positive comments that imagine a potential follow-up for Sleeping Dragon.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>","time":"December 17th, 2012 12:16 am","title":"Sleeping Dragon: Post-mortem"}