So, I finished my game. It’s not an instant classic. But here’s my post mortem;

What went right

• Groovy, groovy is awesome. Quick prototyping, quick feedback from the mechanics. After reading the theme and doing some quick brainstorming, I had tested 2-3 concepts within the hour. Why I took the less action-packed of them all is another bullet point.
• Coding. I laid out my mechanics Saturday morning. Listed what I wanted and implemented everything. That’s cool.
• Time management. I think I spent a whole lot less time than my other two entries. I made a loose schedule based on 3 parts (simple mechanics, advanced mechanics, art) and when I started a part I would make a tight schedule.
• Music. Even though there are some Linux issues with it, I like the music I recorded for my entry. If you have the time to spare and there wasn’t any music in my game on your platform. Open the sound files and listen to them. I tried to give it a nice summer vibe and I did ok, I think.
• Bugs. Bugs were rapidly found and exterminated.

What went ok

• Art. My crops look horrible, BUT compared to my level of arts, it’s bloody brilliant.

What went wrong

• The theme. I didn’t think evolution would get picked, so I didn’t think about some ideas before the compo started. I spent the first half hour staring at my wall trying to come up with a good angle. I didn’t, so I just went with what seemed most feasible and finished that.
• Linux. God. I thought Java was cross platform? Sound issues forced a -lame- workaround for Linux.
• I was going to do a mouse oriented game. The only mouse action in the game is closing it…

What went horribly wrong

• Sunday afternoon I made a jar to give to caranha to test out some stuff. I then realized it would not run. not even on my own machine. And the issue was with Groovy. So fuck that, I thought, I wasn’t going to spend hours trying to find the solution to this: I ported it to Java in record time. Who would’ve thought that the thing that was making me progress so fast would be the thing holding me back?

Conclusions

Groovy is good for prototyping, I’ll probably won’t use it in the next Ludum for the actual game code. Although I missed a lot of features while porting to Java. I just love Groovy.

Setting out reasonable goals concerning mechanics is really reassuring and made me enjoy the coding a lot more. Last Ludum I was frantically coding my game and leaving bugs everywhere. I haven’t looked at that codebase because it makes grown men cry.

Clean code is possible in Ludum. It’s not as clean as it could be, but it’s not confusing to read or quickfixes upon quickfixes upon bugs like my previous entry.

If you want to incorporate some features, I wanted a mouse oriented game, make sure you know how to before the compo starts. I didn’t bother looking it up, because I would lose precious time. In hindsight, I did have the time to look it up, but better safe than sorry. In other words: know your tools.

My cell phone  has a decent microphone to record my music.

Have fun,
Eek.