{"author_name":"rwos","cat":"LD #24","comments":[],"epoch":1346268600,"likes":0,"metadata":{"p_key":"51615","p_author":"rwos","p_authorkey":"14690","p_urlkey":"87309","p_title":"Moore\u2019s Game \u2013 compo Postmortem","p_cat":"LD #24","p_event":"LD24","p_time":"1346268600","p_likes":"0","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"14690","us_name":"rwos","us_username":"rwos","event_start":"1345766400","event_key":"12","event_name":"LD24"},"text":"

This was my first Ludum Dare and I made a game called “Moore’s Game<\/a>“. It’s basically a journey through the evolution of video games – starting with Tic Tac Toe on a line-printer and ending with a ray-casting first person shooter.<\/p>\n

Technology-wise it’s written in JavaScript, using the 2d-context of the HTML5 canvas element.<\/p>\n

What went right<\/h3>\n

Speed<\/strong> – apart from the few times where I got stuck (more on that later), I was working pretty fast. Pong, Breakout and the raytracer for the Wolf3D-like level were done really quickly. It helped that I disregarded every coding best practice in existence. Even though faking namespaces via objects or closures is possible and common in Javascript, I didn’t do that and just put everything into the global namespace. That made for messy code (more on that later) but speedy development.<\/p>\n

Although I (think I) was fast, I couldn’t finish everything I had originally planned. More on that later (that’s going to be a big what-went-wrong section, oh my…).<\/p>\n

Technology choice<\/strong> – Modern Javascript interpreters (read: browsers) are blazingly fast, given the (security-)constraints in which they have to operate. The canvas API is simple and straight-forward. And the result is playable on every operating system with a modern browser.\u00a0 What’s not to like about that? Javascript as a language has it’s share of problems, but it’s not too bad. It has really just the wrong syntax for the dynamic, lisp-like language it actually is.<\/p>\n

The competition\u00a0<\/strong>– as I said, this was my first Ludum Dare. I had the most programming-related fun since …ever, really! \":-)\" I also didn’t expect such a cool community. I was on the IRC a little bit, during the competition, and I was stunned how friendly and civilized everyone behaved. It’s the internet, people, you are expected to endlessly insult each other!<\/p>\n

No, Ludum Dare is just great – it won’t be my last one!<\/p>\n

What went wrong<\/h3>\n

Scope<\/strong> – that was my biggest problem. I just planned too much features. And while implementing those I had ideas for even more and more and more… I originally wanted to blend the gameplay from one game-generation into the other (that is, playing a bit of a Mario-Bros.-like jump-and-run with Pacman, for example) – but I had just no time for that. The games itself were all simple and small – but there were eight of them.<\/p>\n

Which, by my current calculations, were at least seven games too many for a 48h-competition…<\/p>\n

Code Quality<\/strong> – let’s not talk about that. This was hands-down the worst code I’ve ever written. I’ve written BASIC on my calculator that was better structured… I just didn’t have time to stop and think. So, copy-and-paste it was, mostly. And brute force. And a lot of “what’s the most stupid thing that could possibly work at least half of the time”.<\/p>\n

Pacman<\/strong>– I still don’t know how the hell I managed to get completely stumped by writing pacman. I was on the wrong path, somehow and as a result I wasted much too much time even getting it to the sorry state it’s in now. The ghosts just move randomly, the frame-rate is ridiculously low, it’s buggy as hell. And it doesn’t even look too much like pacman. Not good.<\/p>\n

Adventure<\/strong> – The lucas-arts inspired point-and-click adventure level was first planned to be the *cool* level of the game. The one that would pay back for all the bugs in the other levels. Well, no, that didn’t work out. I wrote half of an engine for it, but there just wasn’t enough time – and I didn’t really know how to actually write a point-and-click adventure game engine… So I started that level over – with about 4 hours left – and basically cut down all the features until it was just one big if-else tree. Not good, part 2.<\/p>\n

<\/strong>Time management<\/strong> – It’s easy to lose track of just how much work is still to do when you’re working on eight different games at the same time. And losing track I did.<\/p>\n

Knowledge<\/strong> – Before I started, I thought that I generally knew how to program all the games I had planned. Well, yes, generally. But what are good jumping dynamics for a platformer? How should I do collision testing? How do I insert scaled sprites into a ray-casted world? By which rules do the monsters move in pacman? I have no idea. Oh, and no time to find out… Not good, part 3.<\/p>\n

What I’ll do different next time<\/h3>\n

I’m going to write one game. Like, one.<\/p>\n

1<\/p>\n

One! Eins! Uno!<\/p>\n

One<\/strong> single, polished, working game that’s fun to play.<\/p>\n

Not freaking eight badly made ones…<\/p>\n

Thanks everyone!<\/h3>\n

Ludum Dare 24 was fun! \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n \n

Tags: postmortem<\/a><\/p>","time":"August 29th, 2012 2:30 pm","title":"Moore\u2019s Game \u2013 compo Postmortem"}