So, all in all, I think this dare went WAY better than my last (which was my first). I think what mainly accounted for my better outcome was finally swallowing my pride and deciding to write a 2D game. It’s amazing how much removing that 3rd dimension simplifies things. I wanted to make something cool, so I really didn’t want to spend too much time just trying to think of ideas. I couldn’t think of any amazing revolutionary new game play style, so I just went with the good old classic top-down shooter. Of course, to keep it with the theme, I set the goal of the game to escape the game. I probably won’t do too well on theme points but I’m still proud of my creation. After all, who of us really does this in hopes of winning? I just do it as a motivational leap to start a new project.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=4069

What Went Right

So, for the most part, the beginning went very smoothly. I stayed up until 4:30 AM the first day and got a lot of the core coding done. I started with the basics – a basic OOP design in C++ (my language of choice), movement, and collisions. Then, I started to get my hands dirty with a weapon system. Unfortunately, I ended up changing the weapon system since adding new weapons eventually turned out to be a huge hassle (this was actually after I finished the compo version game). Next came the rovers. Rovers went along a lot smoother than I expected them to. No problems really there. All hell broke loose when I started programming doors though.

What Went Wrong

Basically, I thought doors were going to be like 30 minutes tops, but they ended up being like 2 hours. First, I had to write basic animation functionality in the object class – no problem. Switching states became a huge hassle and I finally  broke down and analyzed the update loop step by step – then I finally got it. I was forcing a specific frame in the door code on certain states, but this created problems, so I ended up just letting them flow naturally and not try to prevent the occurrence of a bad frame (which I later found was not possible to occur). Another huge issue that I didn’t expect was scrolling. Yes, scrolling. Of all things that could go wrong, scrolling did. I ended up having to edit a lot of drawing code that should have been there from the beginning.

All in all, I think my favorite thing to add was the shaking when an explosion goes off. It’s freakin’ awesome 😛

Thanks for a great Ludum Dare guys! I had a great time.