Now, a couple of days went by and i got a lot of positive feedback, thanks to all of you <3

I must say i am pretty satisfied with my entry. But some comments had me frustrated (not the comments in particular, but the cause of them). People were experiencing crashes, or the game not starting properly, and if it works, they get stuck because i made some design fails in the early levels. Poeple weren’t able to experience, what i had worked on so hard, just because i made some mistakes in the development. It felt devastating.

When i read that submitting fixes were allowed, if they are dependant on having the game working, i was rejoicing. It still leaves me with a crappy level design, and that can’t be helped just yet. Just take it as a challenge. They are definately solveable.
I would love to record a play-through but my machine is too slow to have the game running and fraps recording at the same time I might be able to do it at a friends pc the next couple of days though, so look forward to it

So to mention the issues that came up:

1: Crash on startups
There were few occasions of startup crashes. One of them was a fault at the model loading in the collada parser. I used float.parse() without the ‘i-dont-care’ parameter (CultureInfo.Invariant) so it crashed for some localizations ( using ‘,’ / ‘.’ delimeter ). That was obviously fixed pretty easy once i knew whats wrong. I just had to add some basic exception handling to the code to find out about it. I should have added that long ago, anyways.

2. Levels only getting loaded partially or not at all
The building and collapsing animation of the level geometry was written in the last hours of the development, so it was a rather hackish attempt and i knew it wouldn’t be perfect to begin with. I also knew that my timing sucks, as i was using GetTickCount(); which is rather unprecise, only getting updated about every 16ms. Not quite enough for a solid physics simulation.

I started playing around with different timing methods that are available in .net, which boil down to GetTickCount()/Environment.TickCount and QueryPerformanceCounter()/Stopwatch, not being satisfied with the results of the latter, as it was jittering like hell. As i figured out after a couple of hours, the actual problem lies in the game loop. After reworking some basic orders (i fooked around in it while working on the game) it worked like charm. Physics feel alot smoother, and the levels construct/deconstruct correctly.

3. The goal model was not showing up for some
Actually, i have no idea what the cause was, i still don’t. It was fixed with the time/gameloop fix though. So it comes for free. (Although it still looks ugly whiteish as the texture is not working correctly. I won’t fix that for the entry, cause i’m not allowed to :p)

4. There is still a reported crash, without putting out some error message, besides “error” apparently, which i can only hope is unique to that one user. Although i’d love to fix it, i have no way to do so at this point. Sorry about that alexlarioza :\

If you experience crashes or other bugs, please let me know. You can find me on Twitter or irc://irc.afternet.org/ludumdare as wzl or redwater\wzl,

Thanks, it is really appreciated

Finally, thanks again to all of you providing constructive feedback. It really helps designing a solid concept to work on. If you liked it, you should look forward to the next iteration of the game

Enjoy playing, and good luck with your entries fellow luders \o/