Hi Everybody,

Since I had so much fun at this competition, I thought I’d share some of my thoughts in retrospect, 7 days after everything was done.

Basically, this will be a post-mortem of my game “Mauritius” along with random thoughts.

The Idea:

Upon finding out what the theme was, I started thinking quite a bit. I set myself a deadline of 6 hours into the competition to come up with an idea, and start working. To stimulate thinking, I opened up and read about Islands in Wikipedia, yielding all sorts of stupid ideas. I wasn’t sure if I was looking for a game in which islands are a game mechanic element, or merely a theme element. Needless to say, I went with the latter.

Reading about islands really stimulated me, and soon enough I had a bunch of random drawings on my desk, portraying various islands in all shapes and forms (including one on the back of a giant sea turtle, which was the runner up idea…). Finally, somehow I stumbled upon Mauritius and the story of the Dodo, and that was it.

Game Mechanics and Code:

Choosing a platformer/side-scroller was almost obvious for me, I have only recently went back to playing with game-programming, and anything more complex than that was out of the question.

I drew some sketches of what the game would look like, and didn’t really think of the details. I think this is the main flaw of my game, game mechanics are just too simple – I just didn’t have any good ideas regarding those, at least not ones I knew how to implement.

Code was written in C++ and ClanLib. I have been playing with both in the weeks before LD, just to make sure I remember how to wield this tool. I must say that 48h of coding really helps in MAKING THINGS WORK, without worrying about “But what if I want to add this feature?”. This really streamlined the whole experience, resulting in some ugly code, but at least a whole game. Definitely one of the best lessons leared – just code, damn it! don’t think about it.

Art:

The first thing I did is draw the Dodo sprites. I LOVE drawing sprites, and this one was especially fun. As a reference I searched for “Dodo” in google images, and just left the tab open while I draw the 32×32 pixels bird. Using GraphicGale’s onion skin really helped in making the animation better. The Portuguese hunter is a sprite I am particularly proud of – I drew using a random reference I found on google images (some 18th century etching), and for a 32×64 sprite I think it has nice details. I would have worked more on the animation though, but I didn’t have the time.

Tiles were drawn in a big frame in Paint.NET and later cut down to a tile set. I found this method good because it readily shows you how the tiles connect to each other. It’s the first time I made tiles for a side scroller of this kind, and it was FUN. Paint.NET, however, is really not an ideal tool for this – the grid is just not robust enough there, and handling 32×32 chunks is real cumbersome.

Music:

Music was whipped up very quickly – I used FruityLoops which I really like, and some samples I found on my hard-drive. I wanted something “Jungle” like, but not too happy, and I kinda like the result. Sounds effects were not really important, so I just went with “sfxr” and it did the job.

Random Thoughts:

Eli who introduced me to LD was very supportive, and having someone going through what you are, and sharing ideas, version, graphics and such was a great way to feel how you are coming along in the competition. I don’t think I would have finished anything there without him, so thanks dude!

In conclusion, I had an AWESOME time here at LD, and I am really looking forward for the next one. From what I’ve seen and rated so far, there are some REALLY good games here, so Kudos to all!

Thanks for reading,

Daniel