I say “preliminary” because it’s possible I’ll do a larger more in depth one later.

In making this game I made two huge oversights:

• I used a 2d hardbody physics engine to make a platformer
• I had a total of maybe 12 hours of usable time including a mad bughunt from 12-3AM and most of my basecode writing.

Nevertheless, I’m not disappointed with what I got out of it. I’m just about to do some spriting and make the game look less like debug-draw mode.

Things that went right:

• Everything got up and working quickly
  I did tiles properly and fairly efficiently, I got entities running their update(dt) lines within the first hour, a camera was quick to implement, it all ran along nicely.
• I prevented it from looking too terrible without assets
  seriously, the smoke class made the difference.
• I planned it for destructible terrain from the start
  That way there wasn’t any issues with me destroying tiles and the like, and it wasn’t just a thrown-in game mechanic.
• It isn’t too boring to play
  Me and my brother sat down for a good 20 mins or so having turns and laughing at ourselves. It’s pretty hard, made moreso by the whole running-out-of-space-to-play-in-thing and the you’re-weaker-than-all-the-enemies thing, but I feel that there’s quite a bit of gameplay there to be had, even if most of it’s emergent.

Things that went wrong:

• BOX2D.
  the callbacks i was using basically raped my game silly for just about all of its development time. I spent probably 7 of my 12 hours plagued by a recurrent bug that I just couldn’t squash. Turns out it was fixable by doing the good old mark now,  delete once resolved business, but goddamn I managed to set up those callbacks in a way that made that difficult. So, rule 1 for next time: set up a destruction system beforehand, or don’t use real physics when you don’t need them.
• Poor time management.
  The fact that I ended up with 5 hours development time, 7 hours bughunting should tell you something about how improvised the whole thing was.
• No art

Now with 99% less bugs.

All in all, it’s been an awesome learning experience. Grab/rate the game from Here.

I’ll be working more on this in the coming days, I suspect. It’d be nice to get a version with graphics up, at least, to give the game some context.

edit: fixed broken link.