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Bugfixes, Timelapse and Post-Mortem

[raw] LD17LD #17 - Islands - 2010 26. Apr 2010 ยท 07:34 UTC · 3 days after compo start by Stoney · 0

I fixed three critical bugs:

  • Fixed a bug where you couldn’t start a new game
  • Fixed a bug where the character disappeared
  • Fixed a bug where you couldn’t beat the game

    • The new version has already been uploaded. Get it here.
    As for the Mac and Linux ports, I’m having a bit of a problem with the Mac port, so it might take a bit longer than expected. But you can always try to compile the source for yourself. :)

    I have uploaded the timelapse on Youtube: Watch it here.
    Gameplay and walktrough video will follow as soon as I have the Mac port ready.

    I’m still a little bit sleepy, but I wanted to fix those bugs as soon as possible. And because I hacked the game together in such short time I didn’t care about memory resources and stuff you need a relatively fast computer to run (works fine on my Macbook Pro in a virtual machine, but sometimes lags on my Single-core Atom 1.6 GHz Nettop).

    Read on for the post-mortem.

    Personally I didn’t like the theme that much. First of all, because I used islands in my LD #16 game, in several other prototypes and couldn’t really find an idea that would be different from them. I had several ideas in my head, such as “You are the island”, some kind of Project Nomads game in which you have a floating island, build towers on your island and battle other islands, a RPG-like game where you go from island to island solving different quests and finally the survivor idea.
    I went with the latter because I thought I can pull that off in 48 hours. The plan was to make kind of parody game, I don’t know if you can already tell in the status the game is now in. I planned a nice little intro, where you definitely get the idea that the game doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it got cut due to lack of time.
    Sketch from what should have been the intro sequence
    I nearly spent the complete first day on graphics and I could have been more productive. The most productive time for me was the last nine hours before the deadline. The actual gameplay got finished the hour before the deadline, so there wasn’t a a lot of time left for playtesting.
    Still, this is the most finished LD game I made yet, you actually have around 20 minutes of gameplay. Well, allright, that depends if you are exploring the world, building stuff or just focusing on the goal.

    The Good

  • Graphics & Music: Of course it could be better and the graphics are not 3D, but for the time invested it’s fairly good
  • Luck: I had so much luck during development. I had to modify some core parts of my framework and was getting a lot of Access Violations and cryptic messages. If I hadn’t found the error in time, the game probably wouldn’t have been submitted
  • Technical design: I designed classes and the gameplay elements very early in the developmen process, so it was more or less loading an displaying the graphics accordingly and seeing if it really works like expected

    • The Bad

  • Motivation: I don’t know why but I was not that motivated this time, only in the last couple of hours the motivation to finish the game was back
  • Humor: I was planning to add more humoristic elements, but the time wasn’t enough
  • Scripting: I was planning to script an intro, instructions and credits screen, but again not enough time; so there isn’t actually any scripting in the game

    • What I’m planning to do for next time?

  • Extend my base code/framework: I especially need a camera class and something to manages maps that are bigger than just one screen
  • Integrate a level editor into the base code or write one myself

    • All in all, it was fun as always :) and I can’t wait to play all those games.

    Tags: post-mortem, timelapse