{"author_name": "Bartje321", "cat": "LD #21", "comments": [{"author_name": "panzermancer", "time": "August 22, 2011 1:30 pm", "epoch": 1314037800, "text": "This looks, sounds, and most likely plays almost exactly for the highway-driving example game released for GM6 and GM7…", "spam": "N"}], "epoch": 1314037320, "likes": 0, "metadata": {"p_key": "63768", "p_author": "Bartje321", "p_authorkey": "5164", "p_urlkey": "99553", "p_title": "", "p_cat": "LD #21", "p_event": "LD21", "p_time": "1314037320", "p_likes": "0", "p_comments": "1", "p_status": "UPD5", "us_key": "5164", "us_name": "Bartje321", "us_username": "bartje321", "event_start": "1313712000", "event_key": "7", "event_name": "LD21"}, "text": "

\"Freeway

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This was my first time i entered Ludum Dare.

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I only had 12 in total to work on my project.  But somehow i got something working.  I decided to create a game where you have to escape the cops on the freeway.  I tried to make it not to complicated,  so i could finish it in the limited time i had.  I started by creating some of the base code and the graphics for the game.

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\"Freeway

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The base code was nothing more than an applet with double buffering,  a thread with frame limiter to progress the logic,  a key-listner for user input and a loader class to easily load resources into the game. I lost almost a hour figuring out why my applet didn’t draw a thing.  It was a stupid mistake.  I called thread.run  (which doesn’t start a new thread)  instead of thread.start  (which does start a new thread).

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The graphics took me most of the day.  I spend around 3 hours drawing the cars and the road,  and another half hour for the lights sprites.  Regionally i wanted to add different road tiles,  so the road wouldn’t be boringly repeating itself,  but there was not enough time.  After this the Saturday was finished for me. I didn’t even had a single car driving yet.

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Sunday i started on the main code,  unsure if i had enough time left.  First i got the player car driving,  which was actually quite easy.  After that i worked on the other cars.  After an hour or 2 i got a “working” game.  But it was still quite boring,  because you could drive through everything.  So Time for collision detecting.

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After the collision detection and writing code for the sprites.  I had to create the title and game over screen.  Which got finished just in time.  After this i had to go away for a while so i shut down my computer.

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After starting my computer back up…  disaster strikes.  All my images where gone…  I think eclipse throw them away,  but i’m not sure about that.  I tried a recovery tool,  but no luck there. Luckily i had posted an screenshot on twitter from where i could recover a lot of the graphics.  It took me a pressures hour to restore the damage.

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I still had to code the police cars but the clock was running out.  So i hadn’t much time to tweak the behavior.  Especially the detection if it can go left or right is a bit broken,  so it can happen that police cars overlap each other a bit,  or drive full speed into an other car.

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I haven’t had any time to include sounds,  so the game is a bit silent.  On the other hand it saved me some time programming a mute button.

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Lessons learned:

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You can find the game (including the source) here.

", "time": "August 22nd, 2011 1:22 pm", "title": ""}