Hello,

First of all, thank you all for your nice comments.

This is the postmortem of my entry for LD17: Clean the Island!!

My plan:

• Submit my first game to LD
• Learn PlayBasic: I was looking for a language that allows me to code 2D games. I chose PlayBasic because I read it has sliding collision and pixel perfect collision built-in.
• Compose and play a great song for the game
• Have fun

What went right:

• I did submit my first “game”
• After a couple of hours of thinking I decided to create a top-down perspective game with mouse-only control. I’ve spent a lot time trying to develop games that can be controlled using only the mouse. I would like to develop games for people who can play card games but cannot play Platforms games: playing with the mouse is easier than playing with the cursor keys.
• I think the game mechanic has a lot of potential.
• I learnt PlayBasic: good and bad things. Good things: it was easy to code with it, and implement sliding collision was simple.
• I think that I’m not good at graphics/animation/pixel art, but I think the sprites creation went well. I decided to implement a retro-look: I created all sprites 16×16 px and then resize to 128×128 px and he palette didn’t have more thatn 16 colors (I believe).
• I used Paint.Net a lot. Before this game my only graphic tool was The Gimp, but this time I used Paint.Net only and now I think it is great.
• I did have fun

What went wrong:

• I almost couldn’t submit the game. I finished it like 5 minutes before deadline.
• I was using a new notebook. I had to install a lot of applications during the weekend.
• I spent a lot of time trying to implement vsync+time-based movement. I couldn’t do it, so I just implemented vsync (built-in in PlayBasic). Part of the problem was that I couldn’t make vsync works in my new notebook. Two days later, I reboot the notebook and vsync started to work
• I spent a lot of time learning PlayBasic. It is very similar to DarkBasic Pro so it was easy but some parts like camera code and map creation was new to me. I don’t think it was a good idea for a 48 hrs. competition.
• I didn’t understand the map creation application for PlayBasic so I had to write the complete level as a read/data commands. Because of this I could only make one level because it took me more like one hour to code just the first level.
• I din’t have time to write and play the song. So I created using pre-recorded loops That was the worst part for me, although I think the song is quite good 😉

The future of Clean the Island!!

• Besides being voting for other entries in LD competition I’ve being porting the game to Game Maker 8: As a I said before I’m trying to find a game development environment that allows me to create 2D games easily. I’ve skipped Game Maker because I don’t feel confortable with point-and-click tools. But then I was reading about GML (Game Maker Language) and it looks great for 2D games. I ported most of the game mechanics in 4 to 6 hours.
• One problem I had was that GM don’t have sliding collision built-in, but I made a simple one in a very short time period.
• Then, I created two new types of enemies (cacti and spiders) and 6 levels. You can check the new levels here in Gamejolt.
• I’m planning to add more levels, enemies and some puzzles without changing the core mechanics. Stay tuned 😉

Best regards

JF