Hello all! I hope everyone feels pretty happy with what they’ve produced, and I can’t wait to have time to sit down and play more entries and start reviewing! As for my game, Static, here’s the rundown:

The Good

• Got a cool idea Friday night after brainstorming for a while.
• It was an idea that I knew I could actually do even with my tiny amount of experience with LibGDX and total lack of sophisticated game dev know-how.
• Static has every feature that I wanted to add to it, and *crosses fingers* no game-breaking bugs.
• Static is pretty fun to play and mess around with.
• Instead of the usual obsessing over the music for ever, I just did it, and it works pretty well.
• Eclipse, Git, and my laptop cooperated pretty well for the duration.

The Not-So-Good

• Got a bit of a late start on Saturday, could’ve gotten up earlier.
• The game is a definite CPU hog (but it’s still playable!)
• Lack of planning and realizing GWT is complicated prevented the intended web version from happening. As far as I knew applets just happened…
• No Android version because of the performance issues.
• Code could be *much* cleaner; particularly on Sunday, I found myself implementing more than a few magic numbers, and I didn’t change them for lack of time.
• No menu screen. I have yet to figure out the proper way to do this with LibGDX, either through scene2D or TWL; all of the tutorials I found were just too dated for this fast-paced engine.
• Because of the lack of menu screen, the controls are a small wall of text in-game, but they are organized, legible, and hopefully, clear.

Conclusions:

• LD is a lot of fun!
• It’s important to focus on something that you know you can do and as many people have said, not try to learn much during the compo.
• Porting to web is hard; learn it in advance if you intend to do it.
• Enjoy your time, and don’t panic!
• Spend some time reading Twitter and the main page; there’s fun and inspiring stuff on there.
• If you have trouble concentrating (like me), there’s no better cure than LD. I was really amazed at how focused I could be on a project that was fun and very challenging to do, and extremely rewarding!

Overall, I think I did pretty well with a *hopefully* fun sand-box game, a different interpretation of the theme, and a fun time coding. I can’t wait for the next one when I’ll have learned some more of the intricacies of game programming and can make something more sophisticated. In the meantime, however, please enjoy playing and rating my game; I’ll be sure to play yours as well!

Thanks to everyone in the LD community for a great and truly inspiring time! Here’s a screenshot (and link 😉 representing both my game and my evolution during the compo. Enjoy!