I had a lot of fun working on my entry! This has been my third of many Ludum Dares. Working on Crawl the Dungeon was a lot of fun, even though I had to scrap many wanted features because of time constraints. Anyway, here are my what-went-right’s and what-went-wrongs

What went right

7 hours before it started, I started working on a quick and simple level editor. It has helped me out immensely, even though I only have 1 actual map. There were some issues with the original release (it repainted way too often, which took a lot of time) but with a few small tweaks, that was fixed. In any case, it made changing and adding levels extremely easy.

My game content, while very basic and ugly, is completely generated from a single XML file, allowing me (or anyone, including you! Right now!) to edit different entities on the fly. Using it saves a lot of time when adding new content.

My code is decently structured, and while in the last few hours I had to do a bunch of dirty fixes, it still is relatively clean compared to my last LD games. Which is nice.

What went wrong

Time. I had to do things on sunday, subtracting about 9 hours of time. Because of that and the features I had planned, I had to scrap a lot of them and even rush a lot of simple things. Graphics are terrible placeholders, there is no sound, there’s only 1 map, no story, and regarding gameplay mechanics, I still wanted to add armor, explosive projectiles, and a bunch of other things like item shops. And the original plan was to add a party system as well. I don’t think I would’ve made all that with the extra 9 hours, but still, it would give me a lot more time to polish things up into a bigger game with more content and features.

Working on the cool content generator took a while. In the long run, it would save me a lot of time when adding new monsters, items, and stuff. But sadly, there is no long run in 48 hours :D. While it’s a very nice system, I wonder if it was worth it. But that’s hindsight, and because it’s there, I might even continue working on my game for a while longer.

Most of my graphics are 1-minute paint jobs, and it shows. 😀 I’m really sad that I didn’t add any sound or music, though. Oh well.

Conclusion

Awesome Ludum Dare. Sadly I didn’t use the theme in the way that I wanted because I ran out of time, but I had a lot of fun as always, and the 3 AM deadline is the best and most exciting deadline ever.