{"author_name":"JoeManaco","cat":"LD #35","comments":[],"epoch":1461261600,"likes":3,"metadata":{"p_key":"5954","p_author":"JoeManaco","p_authorkey":"6837","p_urlkey":"41401","p_title":"Post Mortem: Shape Escape","p_cat":"LD #35","p_event":"LD35","p_time":"1461261600","p_likes":"3","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"6837","us_name":"JoeManaco","us_username":"\/author\/joemanaco\/","event_start":"1460678400","event_key":"33","event_name":"LD35"},"text":"

Here is the post mortem to my game Shape Escape<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You can watch the timelapse here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

THE BEGINNING<\/strong>
\n I stayed awake until 3 a.m. when the theme got announced (I’m living in Germany). Then went to bed and thought about different ideas. When I woke up I got myself a nice breakfast with my family and talked about my idea where the player can shapeshift the main character and each charactar has an own AI\/Behaviour. So the player won’t be able to control the character directly. A little bit like lemmings but with only one character. <\/p>\n

My tools were Monkey-X<\/a>, Photoshop, Tiled<\/a> and Logic Pro. I had a very bad start: First thing I needed was to load in and render a Tiled-Map. Something I did a hundred times before. But as I decided to not use my own “framework” I got into some trouble. I just thought I could extract the tiled-loader out of it, but it has so many OOP-Crap-Dependencies I had two choices. Write a new tiled loader from scratch or switch to my old framework. I decided to write a new tile loader from scratch and lost around 4 hours.<\/p>\n

But after that it went quite smoothly. I decided to try the core mechanic with very simple art (I just used various colored Rectangles for everything) and when I put the first shapeshift into my demo-map I decided that the game mechanic ist quite good so I would go on with the idea.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The second day some annoying collision bugs popped up and it required quite some time to fix them. The rest of the day I spent building some levels (wished I could have added more) and created a simple chiptune in Logic. I used a “Instrument-Layout” I’ve created originally for my platformer Tiny Thor<\/a>, because I knew when I start to select\/search for the right sounds that could take myself hours and hours. After improvising on my synth for some time I found a nice melody I liked and from there I’ve arranged the song around it and I’m so glad that people seems to like it because time was slowly running out and I was in a really hurry.<\/p>\n