{"author_name":"Nicholas Reda","cat":"LD #25","comments":[],"epoch":1355101140,"likes":1,"metadata":{"p_key":"50849","p_author":"Nicholas Reda","p_authorkey":"505440","p_urlkey":"86542","p_title":"I\u2019m in! and Other Unfinished Business","p_cat":"LD #25","p_event":"LD25","p_time":"1355101140","p_likes":"1","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"505440","us_name":"Nicholas Reda","us_username":"Nicholas Reda","event_start":"1355443200","event_key":"14","event_name":"LD25"},"text":"

Well, it’s that time of year again! I can already taste (or smell?) the code in the air! This competition I’ll be using a new skill set that I’ve acquired since the last competition (August 24).<\/p>\n

My Tools:<\/strong><\/p>\n

-Java<\/p>\n

-Eclipse IDE<\/p>\n

-SFXR<\/p>\n

-Paint.NET<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My Libraries:<\/strong><\/p>\n

-LWJGL (OpenGL, OpenAL, etc..)<\/p>\n

-Slick_Util.jar (OpenGL textures, BufferedImageUtil)<\/p>\n

-LWJGL_Util (GLUPerspective)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Speaking of Ludum Dare, I never got around to writing a Post-Mortem<\/strong> entry after the competition, so here it is:<\/p>\n

Overview:<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the time I didn’t have much knowledge of font or 3D, so I used my knowledge of Java2D. I ended up encountering many problems during the competition due to my lack of experience (I had just started to learn java, my first programming language, in May). The first 5 hours were pretty mundane, with a lot of utility coding to handle buffered images and AWT frames, but I managed to create a fully functional game base code that served me well throughout the competition. After that, I started work on the game environment. The only problem was, I hadn’t much thought of an idea so I really had to go off of what I had in my mind at the time, which was a classic osmosis type of game style (which was the only thing I could think of with a theme like evolution). A little while into coding, I realized I didn’t exactly think of the most memory efficient way to implement this (a 5000 pixels square image) and I ran out of memory. I panicked, and quickly simplified the idea into a type of board game, which turned out to be too complex to code in the remaining time. In the last 10 hours, I finally just decided to create a simple remix\u00a0of conway’s game of life to turn it into an actual game. Because this idea was a lot more fun to play than I expected and because I was placed 95th in innovation, I considered it to be a good competition overall.<\/p>\n

Things that went right:<\/strong><\/p>\n

-The final idea that I came up with turned out to be pretty fun and creative<\/p>\n

-While slightly flawed, I wrote some pretty good base code that reduced the amount of repetition required<\/p>\n

-I used a language that supported all platforms, so I didn’t have to make an effort to port the game (except to fix bugs on mac’s demented JVM release)<\/p>\n

-I wrote a pretty cool AI to challenge the player<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Things that went wrong:<\/strong><\/p>\n

-I tried to implement too many mechanics into one idea<\/p>\n

-I disregarded all boundaries of the java virtual machine and created tons of memory leaks<\/p>\n

-Throughout my program, I wrote some pretty inefficient code that cost me some time<\/p>\n

-I was new to coding, so I had to debug pretty much everything I wrote<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Overall:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Because of the final product’s innovation, challenge, and creativity, along with it’s fairly good ranking , I considered this competition a success.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Photos:<\/strong><\/p>\n

-My Lunch, consisting of home-made macaroni and cheese,<\/p>\n

along with a mixture of orange juice and mountain dew (which<\/p>\n

tasted pretty interesting), and my coding station for the duration of the<\/p>\n

competition:<\/p>\n

\"My<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>","time":"December 9th, 2012 7:59 pm","title":"I\u2019m in! and Other Unfinished Business"}