So, this is my second Ludumdare. This time, my graphics engine did not crap out on me. Unfortunately, I still tried to push it too hard, and discovered that my old shader pipeline was, in fact, barely even usable. This time I actually put in audio, and discovered that my audio engine was flat out broken when you tried to do anything more strenuous then play music. Thankfully I was able to rather quickly patch that up, but there was no way for me to completely rebuild the shader pipeline, so I lost many hours trying to get shaders to work that just didn’t. I still managed to sneak in some subtle sunrays and found another use for the burn thing. Thankfully, my physics engine stayed robust, even though I misused it several times. It was fun making sound effects with bxfr too.

Sadly, none of my tools were functional, like I had planned. I didn’t know about Ludumdare until the middle of finals week, and my tools were only half finished. In light of the project it is becoming increasingly obvious that I need better object management. Deferring object deletion so it doesn’t cause physics collision problems is so ridiculously commonplace that it needs to be standardized. I’m not totally sure the best way to standardize it though. Possibly through a game object linked list that would keep track of things, but then I kept needing to iterate through different groups. A dynamic set of linked lists that formed groupings (possibly via a skiplist) would be ideal, I think. Theoretically I could also solve the issue by running through the collision list and destroying any collisions that happen to a body being destroyed, but I am not positive about the runtime complexity.

Hopefully next time I will have working tools at my disposal and a more powerful graphics engine will a fully restored shader pipeline and lighting system. Here is the entry for the finished game.