I finished my entry in time for the jam deadline (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=7773). While it is far from what I’d call a finished game (i.e. no sound, still some placeholder graphics & design), I did manage to squeeze in enough time to add an attainable win condition – after fixing a real doozie of a coding problem (several, actually) central to the game’s idea of being set in a world shaped like a cube.

What Went Right:

* Zeroed in on a simple game design and ran with it – Despite the urge to abandon the project due to a seemingly insurmountable coding problem, I stuck with it, solved the problem, and wrapped up the game just in time to submit for the jam. I had no problems cutting parts of the design that were obviously too ambitious for finishing in time for the deadline, while still maintaining some core element of gameyness and a distinctive look & feel.

* Submitted for the jam – Initially, I had wanted to make it in for the compo, but the extended amount of time working on the coding problem for when the player wraps around a side of the cube nixed that idea. Since I was satisfied with the simplicity of the overall game design as well as my ability to simplify it further if needed, I felt that it wouldn’t take much additional effort beyond just solving the wraparound problem to have a finished-enough game and kept going, as mentioned above. This had a hidden added bonus of allowing me to use a bit of additional content I had laying around my hard drive, which came in handy when I needed to put some text up on the GUI. I just went over to C:\Windows\Fonts, Ctrl+C’d Bauhaus 93, and dropped it into my assets folder. Problem solved. Given another five minutes or so of time, I might have even added some sound.

* 3D assets were pretty easy to make. I deliberately kept the game’s look as simple as possible, so that I wouldn’t have to attempt to do anything remotely complicated in 3DS Max, which would’ve likely ended up taking days instead of a couple of hours tops to do. All I did was create a set of cubes with chamfered edges and corners to use as level design elements. I focused in on one tool within 3DS Max and used that for all the 3D assets. With relatively little effort I got a small set of repeatable design elements that give the game a distinctive toylike look.

What Went Wrong:

* Spent entirely too much time getting just the basic gameplay working – I literally had just a couple of hours to spare for the jam when I got the basic gameplay working. This can be attributed more or less to working in 3D with anything less than an absolutely solid understanding of 3D math, which I can tell you now is a lot more than just knowing how matrix multiplication works. While the game did gain a pretty cool look for when you traverse the sides of the cube, IMHO, I had no time to implement any AI or even some simple sound effects. I tried mitigating this lack of time by making the game more maze-oriented, entirely eliminating the idea of having  to evade AI opponents; however, I had to stop about five minutes before the jam deadline to get a build up on the site for my submission, so there are a couple of sides of the cube that are not much if at all different from the placeholder designs I had originally set up.

* No sound – I could have just made some very simple placeholder sound effects in Bfxr at one point while I was banging my head against my desk trying to figure out the wraparound problem. I didn’t. And I didn’t solve the wraparound problem until it was too late to do much else. As a result, there is no sound at all in the game.

* Didn’t zero in on what I would eventually make soon enough. My original ideas were a wee bit more ambitious than a ball navigating a plastic cube labyrinth looking for dots. Some hours at the beginning were spent working on designs I would eventually throw out once I realized I could just make the entire world a single cube with a grid texture and just build on that. Had I started on this design earlier, I would have finished the coding problem earlier and had more time to fully implement the maze design, add some sound effects, and possibly even some AI chasers.

All in all, I did have fun working on this, and I did manage to solve a pretty tricky problem, which I may apply in the future. I may just touch up the game a bit and port it to Android and maybe iPhone. What’s really awesome though is that I made a (debatably) finished game in an (extended) weekend. I can’t say that’s happened very often for me, so that’s definitely a real confidence booster.