This was my first Ludum Dare and even though I didn’t finish my game I really enjoyed the experience. I intend to participate in future jams.<\/p>\n
Here’s how things went for me….<\/p>\n
With the exception of one thing I’l discuss below, I had my Mac completely set up for the competition. All tools were installed\/updated and ready to go so there was nothing to slow me down in that regard.<\/p>\n
I had also discussed the event with my girlfriend in advance, so she made her own plans for the weekend as well.<\/p>\n
I made a decent effort to get involved with the community: I was logged into IRC for a good portion of the weekend, I was tweeting on Twitter, I made a few posts on the LD site. I’m also currently running a survey for the tools people used during the competition<\/a> and am sharing the results of that<\/a> with the community.<\/p>\n I need to make a strong effort reviewing games but unfortunately real life has gotten in the way the last week or so.<\/p>\n Even though I didn’t have a finished game I forced myself to submit what I had done. I don’t know if that ends up being a waste of time for most people looking at my “game”<\/a> but I did receive a number of encouraging comments from other LDers to finish up what I had done since it looked promising. That was certainly a nice thing to read and makes me want to participate again.<\/p>\n I decided to use Ruby for my game. This is because I’ve been doing a lot of Ruby at work and wanted to use the opportunity to expose myself to more. I used the Chingu gem<\/a>, which I like a lot, but I hadn’t sufficiently practiced\/learned enough of it before the competition. My main faltering point was with collision detection. Not knowing the correct\/best way to check various kinds of collisions made behavior like falling, climbing and jumping buggy to implement.<\/p>\n The built-in editor that Chingu provides made it easy to put together a level and I definitely learned a lot about Chingu during the competition.<\/p>\n At the start of the competition I drew out a few vague ideas of what I wanted to do. Originally I was going to make a game using 8×8 sprites since that would make for a “tiny world”. I actually got frustrated with playing something that small and bumped it up to 16×16. I was going in the direction of some sort of Lode Runner type clone (but with Donuts!) but it never really came together.<\/p>\n Since I didn’t have a solid idea, I didn’t really have a finished game. There’s no score. No real goal. No death handling. There’s potential there and I should consider trying to finish it up, as people have suggested.<\/p>\n But nobody wants to play an unfinished game, so it limits my feedback for improvement.<\/p>\n The one piece I didn’t get around to setting up before the weekend was packaging Ruby apps on Windows. I used the Releasy gem<\/a>\u00a0(which was quite easy to use), but due to dependency issues on Windows, I couldn’t get it to work there. You can see me struggling with it towards the end of my time lapse<\/a> for a bit.<\/p>\n As much as I love Ruby, it’s probably not the best choice for creating a cross-platform game, especially if I want something people can play in a browser. I’ve played with Unity 3D before so I’m going to go back to and try to improve my skills there.<\/p>\n I need to spend more time practicing implementing various game mechanics, rules, features, etc. I’ve got a list of games to try cloning in an increasingly difficult order. Hopefully this practice will expand my game programming skills.<\/p>\n Hopefully the two above steps will put me in line to be able to come up with and implement a better game idea next time. A game jam is a bad time to try and figure out something completely new to you. I should probably be focusing on creating something with 80% of the functionality being something I’ve already done.<\/p>\n \n Tags: post-mortem<\/a><\/p>","time":"May 5th, 2012 1:03 pm","title":"My Post Mortem"}Submitted Something<\/em><\/h3>\n
What Went Wrong<\/h2>\n
Collision Detection Woes<\/h3>\n
No Solid Idea<\/h3>\n
Didn’t Finish<\/h3>\n
No Windows Package<\/h3>\n
For Next Time<\/h2>\n
Unity 3D<\/h3>\n
Practice, Practice, Practice<\/h3>\n
Solid Idea<\/h3>\n