{"author_name":"Acheron","cat":"LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!","comments":[{"author_name":"Mikhail Rudoy","time":"May 8, 2011 9:32 pm","epoch":1304908320,"text":"Best of luck. When you finish please post here on LD! I was very excited by the idea when I saw it first, and frankly a bit disappointed by how uncomfortable it was to play the final result :(. I really don’t mean to insult, and in your defense, I’m sure that this was a result of the 48 hour constraint. And now that you have removed that time constraint, I would be VERY interested in the result.","spam":"N"}],"epoch":1304907420,"likes":2,"metadata":{"p_key":"65695","p_author":"Acheron","p_authorkey":"508844","p_urlkey":"101491","p_title":"Back Against the Wall \u2013 A Postmortem","p_cat":"LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!","p_event":"LD20","p_time":"1304907420","p_likes":"2","p_comments":"1","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"508844","us_name":"Acheron","us_username":"Acheron","event_start":"1304035200","event_key":"6","event_name":"LD20"},"text":"

Is should note that I’m developing my entry, Against the Wall<\/a>, into a full game. You can check out my progress on the game’s new site<\/a>. I’ll post a non-compo webplayer there in the near future.<\/p>\n

Now for some self-analysis: On the Friday <\/strong>evening of the competition, I initially tossed around a number of ideas that in retrospect look like the ramblings of a madman. The best one was about a herd of cattle that get telekinetic powers and rampage through a city. Not wanting to do the animation for that, I eventually settled on something simpler: a 3D platformer where the player must climb something by using a special item that forms ledges. I was hoping for something Mirror’s Edge<\/a> style with the platforming, but the eventual hasty execution of that game mechanic left something to be desired.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I made a bunch of boxes, wrote some C# code that made them react to the player’s input, and limited this input by requiring the acquisition of a special item. What the item was, I had no idea at this point. I was wavering between a tk glove or a magnetic device before calling it a magic wand and moving on.<\/p>\n

Saturday <\/strong>began with a texture hunt. I grabbed a digital camera and took pictures of some marble and granite surfaces in a nearby park. Other elements photographed were a blue bath towel, a bookcase, and a random metal box. I applied the stone textures to the boxy models which I created the night before with Blender<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For the procedural world, I bit off more than I could chew. The number of bricks that would exist on even a small chunk of the wall would quickly add up into the thousands, causing my PC to chug. I spent almost all of Saturday on this feature.<\/p>\n

Sunday <\/strong>started with mesh creation. I made a model for the quest giver and faced him away from the player’s starting point, so that the player may initially think it was a human silhouette in the distance. I pinned a note to him (that pops-up and goes away far too quickly) that quoted the theme of the competition, and placed the wand in front of him. I crafted the city-ledge high above the player, made fake walls for the unplayable areas, and scripted some code that would trigger the player’s “winning” of the game. Problem is, I didn’t test it. The blocks that I had placed in a gap under the city that were supposed to be movable were prevented from moving due to a glitch. Imagine my surprise when I found out that my compo entry couldn’t be beaten!<\/p>\n

The take-away? Primarily, I need to budget my time better. I spent almost all of Saturday on my ambitious procedural generator. Placing the bricks by hand would have been well enough and would have taken less time. I should have focused more on the platforming gameplay and level design. Second, I should have set aside the last few hours of the compo for testing my game. Instead, I left everything to the last moment, resulting some major bugs. Third, I went into an eleventh-hour panic when I couldn’t log into my server and Dropbox<\/a> was my only alternative, then panicked because I did not load it in the right compression format, then panicked that I didn’t initially put up a webplayer, ending-breaking bug, etc. In other words, I need to chill out.<\/p>\n

The competition was a fun challenge, and its constraints forced me to think outside the box and make something unique and interesting. My objective now is to flesh-out the game world with some story, add a variety of gameplay mechanics, and form this mess of hastily assembled code into a game.<\/p>\n

Please take the time to play and criticize the compo entry<\/a>. If you like what you see, you can follow my progress on Against the Wall ‘s site<\/a>.<\/p>","time":"May 8th, 2011 9:17 pm","title":"Back Against the Wall \u2013 A Postmortem"}