{"author_name":"qrunchmonkey","cat":"LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!","comments":[],"epoch":1304794380,"likes":1,"metadata":{"p_key":"65702","p_author":"qrunchmonkey","p_authorkey":"3947","p_urlkey":"101498","p_title":"Super Shotgun Deathrace Postmortem and Timelapse","p_cat":"LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This!","p_event":"LD20","p_time":"1304794380","p_likes":"1","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"3947","us_name":"qrunchmonkey","us_username":"qrunchmonkey","event_start":"1304035200","event_key":"6","event_name":"LD20"},"text":"<p>This was my first Ludum Dare &#8211; I went into it feeling completely unprepared, and finished the compo with a game I&#8217;m pretty happy with. I&#8217;m going to attempt to describe how that happened.<\/p>\n <p><strong>What Went Right<\/strong><\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>The Toolchain. I made a rather risky move going into this LD. I decided to use a game engine I&#8217;d never tried (Flixel) in a language I haven&#8217;t used in years (ActionScript 3) in an IDE that doesn&#8217;t run on my OS (FlashDevelop) Crazy, right? Actually, I don&#8217;t think it could have gone better. Flixel&#8217;s handling of basic motion and\u00a0collisions\u00a0is far more intuitive than any physics engine I&#8217;ve tried, and the engine as a whole seems perfectly tailored to quickly prototyping games. Due to some of the awesome features in Flixel, I ended up using Photoshop as my map editor, which worked quite well, and is something I&#8217;ll be thinking about doing more of in the future.<\/li>\n <li>The code. The one\u00a0piece\u00a0of advice I got before Ludum Dare was to not get caught up in the code. That&#8217;s a problem I&#8217;ve had in the past (I&#8217;ve got a number of game prototypes that are more engine than game, nearly all of the utilities I&#8217;ve released have about 3x the functionality that can be shown in their UIs) but with the looming 48 hour deadline, I was able to ignore best practices and just get sh*t done. There&#8217;s dead code, unused variables, methods copied from class to class, and not a comment in the entire program. But it works, and ultimately that&#8217;s all that matters.<\/li>\n <li>Music &amp; Sounds. The audio ended up being much less of a hassle than I&#8217;d initially thought it would be. For the music, I used Garage Band on iPad which has a feature called &#8220;Smart\u00a0Instruments&#8221; &#8211; I gave it a couple chords, and it gave me back a groovy baseline. I spent about as much time making the music as I did trying to get the .mp3 to loop properly. For most of the sound effects I just decided to record them myself. I grabbed my iPhone, went in to the quietest room of the house and made zombie noises for a few minutes. It was fun, actually.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p><strong>What Went Wrong<\/strong><\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>The Theme. At least initially, I had no idea what to do with this theme. I didn&#8217;t want to wind up with the same idea as everyone else, so the obvious ideas of a zeldaish game or something where you only win if you&#8217;re holding the MacGuffin were out. I spent\u00a0probably\u00a04 hours tearing my hair out and contemplating leaving the\u00a0competition before scrawling down &#8220;you start in a portal like chamber where you don&#8217;t get the macguffin, then you fight zombies or something&#8221;<\/li>\n <li>The Graphics. Unlike the code, where I only did what I needed, as I needed it, when it came to the graphics &#8211; I didn&#8217;t really have a plan. I started the graphics before starting the code, which was a mistake &#8211; but the bigger mistake was starting the graphics before I&#8217;d nailed down what the game was going to be. I wasted a lot of time on graphics I didn&#8217;t end up needing, or which just didn&#8217;t look right (all the walk cycles) I&#8217;m\u00a0relatively\u00a0happy with where the graphics ended up, but it took too long to get there.<\/li>\n <li>Planning. I didn&#8217;t really know what my game was going to be until after I was 3\/4 of the way finished, so I didn&#8217;t even have a todo list until the last 12 hours. I&#8217;m pretty good at flying by the seat of my pants, but I think a little pre-planning would have helped. You know, trying to set a couple milestones, researching the engine I was using a little more, that kind of thing.<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>And if you read all that, here&#8217;s your reward! I&#8217;ve uploaded a <a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\/23190646\" target=\"_blank\">Timelapse of the development of Super Shotgun Deathrace<\/a> which you\u00a0probably\u00a0shouldn&#8217;t watch until after you&#8217;ve <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ludumdare.com\/compo\/ludum-dare-20\/?action=rate&amp;uid=3947\">played the game<\/a><\/p>\n \n <p>Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/postmortem\/\" rel=\"tag\">postmortem<\/a><\/p>","time":"May 7th, 2011 1:53 pm","title":"Super Shotgun Deathrace Postmortem and Timelapse"}