Guess a post-mortem is in order.

So I didn’t finish. This was my first LD, and in general I don’t have a good track record of finishing things. I was using tools that I’m not very familiar with, but that wasn’t the main problem. My idea wasn’t, perhaps, as self-contained and unambitious as it should have been, but I should have been able to get something playable out of it given where things were when I gave up.

I’m going to drop most of the blame for this one on a lack of sleep. There’s really no good reason to stay up all night on the first day, but I worked from 11am-4:45am. It was pretty productive work – even towards the end, while things had slowed considerably, progress was still plodding along.

I got to bed at 5:30 and woke up around 11:30. Made a todo list and then failed to get through a quarter of it. The way the code fit together was fine in my head when I went to sleep, but the next day getting a grip on how the various things related and communicated to each other was far too much to cope with after not enough sleep on a disrupted sleep schedule.

And, of course, my game architecture deserves some of the blame for that. Lots of the blame actually, but it’s not so bad. I tried something I hadn’t done much before (components) – it was a good learning experience, certainly. The main idea was pretty good, but the glue holding it all together wasn’t. I’m planning to start a new game and scavenge this game for code – it should hopefully amount to something more stable and useful.

Anyway, that’s that. No grand reason for failure, just far too much enthusiasm for being hardcore on the first day. Being hardcore is for the day it’s due and not before – anything before that is wasted effort.

Tags: post-mortem