Had a great time making “Ant Slayer”, the shrunken exterminator game, finishing about thirty minutes before the deadline with a critical bug fix in the extra hour they gave us.  Here’s my timelapse:

For tools I ended up using 3DSMax, Quake Army Knife, Paint.net with a custom layer saver program, Chronolapse, SFXR, Bryce (for skybox), Audacity, and my own toolset which has an auto-cropper, collada importer with material editing, a bsp builder/lighter/viser, and a UI builder.

What Worked:

• Cutting Risks – I experimented with particles and toon-shading, and ended up nixing both with only 30ish minutes lost.  This turned out to be a great decision.  I’ve written both in the past but I try not to look at old code during the compo.
• Familiar Toolset – XNA and my base code libs are what I use most these days so the familiarity meant I could just spew code like a fire-hose and have it come out decent.
• EZMuze – An xbox indie game (though not really a game) that lets you throw together great sounding music in a hurry.  I ran a mini stereo from an optical decoder over to my computer and recorded with audacity.  I literally made those 3 songs in the 2 or 3 minute chunks of time I was waiting for my levels to light.
• TimeLapse – It was my first time doing a timelapse, and I find it super valuable for reflection on the weekend.  Being tired and under the gun, so much of it is forgotten.
• Prep Work – I took several hours before the compo to do a test app, secure a way to do music, stockpile food and tea, practice making a skybox, and work out relative sizes of things.  My game I work on daily uses meters as the base unit, and my ludum libraries use inches, so I wanted to make sure the sizes came out ok.

What Didn’t:

• Bug Chasing – I blew hours chasing a problem with dynamic lighting which ended up being a very simple logic error.  Pix (the xna shader debugger) wasn’t helping matters as it crashes on load for this game for some reason.
• Wheel Re-inventing – I spent a lot of time on basic code that I have to write for every game I make.  Audio stuff comes to mind but also game state and basic menu stuff took hours.  I should have that stuff in library form so I can focus on the gameplay.
• Virtual Machine – I decided to put my art tools in a virtual machine.  I’ve recently reinstalled and have been trying to keep my development machine clean.  This worked for awhile, but as the maps got bigger it became too slow to be practical.  So I lost some time reinstalling some art tools on my main machine.
• Theme Paralysis – In this and the last time around, I failed horribly.  Ordinarily, as with any game designer or even game player, if you utter a single word of english I can come up with a dozen game ideas around it.  This and last time I was completely stumped and had no idea what to work on.  I just started creating and hoped I would think of something.  Eventually I forgot the theme entirely and just started making fps stuff.  Having slept and had a day to reflect I really regret this.  I’m not sure how many of you saw Chris Hecker’s GDC talk about “An appetite for sameness”, but it really struck a chord with me, and yet here I am, making yet another fps.  It’s more painful when you consider the context of the event, a festival of creativity.

Tags: xna