Well I have failed, completely and utterly.  I know what you’re thinking, “you still have an hour and a half, keep working!” but no, let me give you a rundown of what needs to be accomplished just to get the game in a semi-playable state:

-Fix an error where some of my files in the level editor save nonsense rather than what they are meant to.  At this stage this is the kind of thing that might make your manager shrug and say, “cut that feature completely,” but (admittedly do to a poor decision on my part) without the ability to use this editor I can’t create levels for my game, without saving there is no editor, and without levels there is no game.  The poor decision on my part was to design my game in such a way that writing the levels “by hand” in a .txt is, while technically possible, not feasible.  It could literally take me half an hour to write one level.

-While I do have AI routines for movement through the levels, I have no levels.  So I have never tested this feature, and we all know a feature you haven’t tested is a feature you never added.  So even if I fixed my problem with my files, I’d have to inevitably fix the problems here.

-Design more than one enemy.  OK, here we’re starting to get into territory of what are technically luxuries.  If my goal here was to just release a game of any sort to say, “Yes I submitted something to Ludum Dare,” then I would only need one enemy.  Frankly, for the last three hours that was my goal.  Still, there’s no real game here with only the one enemy I do have, even the “enemy” I have would need some tweaking before he even becomes a threat.  I do not consider a game with no challenge to be a game.

-Give the player some options.  Currently all my player can do is move in the x and y coordinates.  There’s literally nothing to this game if that is all the player can do.

-Program in a win condition.  I have a win condition, in my head and on paper, but it isn’t there yet.

I don’t think I need to go on.  I know this pretty much makes me a quitter, but I don’t see the point in working on this game any more than I have tonight.  I’m going to continue on with the project as I would have after a successful Ludum Dare, but not tonight.  I need to stop coding for a while.  Even with that being said, I didn’t do as good a job keeping in touch about what I was making, so if it ever gets released in any form, you’re not going to recognize it.  Oh well.

Despite all of my defeatism above, I’m very happy I entered this contest.  I learned a lot over the last two weeks, and I have some direction for where to go in the future.  What I did manage to make was something I could never have made two weeks ago, and given just a little more time I might have actually had something worth submitting.  That alone is a very good feeling.  I might not enter the next Ludum Dare (we’ll see where I feel I am when the time comes) but someday I’m going to be back here again someday, and that’s when I’ll succeed.

Thank you for your time.