Well, this was my first foray into Ludum Dare. Time for a post mortem:

The Good:
1. A wise man once said, “Do, or do not, there is not try”. It might’ve been Yoda, I forget… Anyway, the jist of it was that when under pressure I found myself solving problems without giving in to frustration.
2. LWJGL is good. I mean, REALLY good. Everything is very simple to use and it’s a great template for making quick games.
3. I’m surprised at how fast Java seems to handle lists of references which I’d thought were going to slow things down, as for some behaviours the baddies have to iterate through the whole list of tadpoles to find their closest target.

The Bad:
1. Doesn’t look as nice as I’d hoped.
2. Entities go offscreen and you have no hope of finding them. That is going to annoy players. Some zoom function was needed. World needed to be bigger!
3. That background. You’re supposed to be looking INTO the pool, not through it. It should’ve been top down looking in. Could’ve had nice textures and visual distortions to make it look like water.
4. You can win the game by just letting it run?? After a while you get the poison power from the Jellyfish and then you just let the badddies eat to their hearts content.
5. There were supposed to be several ‘stages’ of tadpole for each new power, but I ran out of time. :C

Summary:
Wayyyyyy to much time was spent preparing libraries and utilities that should’ve been written and declared before the competition started. We’re talking basic things like the statemachine, the steering, the texture manager and the sound manager which along with everything else was written on the fly.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=preview&uid=15902

Bring on LD25! I will be ready.