{"author_name":"NiallM","cat":"LD #15 - Caverns - 2009","comments":[],"epoch":1251738000,"likes":0,"metadata":{"p_key":"72522","p_author":"NiallM","p_authorkey":"785","p_urlkey":"108344","p_title":"Post Mortem, Timelapse(s)","p_cat":"LD #15 - Caverns - 2009","p_event":"LD15","p_time":"1251738000","p_likes":"0","p_comments":"0","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"785","us_name":"NiallM","us_username":"niallm","event_start":"1251417600","event_key":"1","event_name":"LD15"},"text":"<p>I&#8217;m really pleased with how this one turned out (and kind of amazed at how much I managed to get done over the course of two days!).\u00a0 It&#8217;s weird how my motivation went in completely the opposite direction to the last one.\u00a0 In that one I started off really excited only to hit a wall on Sunday afternoon, while on this one I started really down (the theme&#8217;s caverns?\u00a0 Really?), only for my enthusiasm to ramp up more and more as my game progressed.\u00a0 It took me ages to get to sleep last night, I was so wired from it all.<\/p>\n <p>I&#8217;ll start with the bad, because it&#8217;s only little things:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>Stupid jumping bug.\u00a0 Platformers really need to have solid collision detection, and mine kind of fell down (ha ha!) there.\u00a0 It&#8217;s no good if you&#8217;re jumping up to a ledge only to fall through it into the lava below.\u00a0 It only took 5 minutes to fix when I came back to it this evening though.\u00a0 The perils of writing a game in only 2 days&#8230;<\/li>\n <li>The music.\u00a0 I&#8217;m not sure it really fits the rest of the game.\u00a0 I was going for an underground, subterranean theme, but I think it&#8217;s just a bit too sinister.\u00a0 I should have tried to do something more upbeat.<\/li>\n <li>The theme.\u00a0 Given all the existing games already set in caverns, I can&#8217;t help feeling I would have made a weirder, more interesting game if one of the other themes had won out.\u00a0 Still, given how Caverns of Light turned out, I&#8217;m not too fussed&#8230;<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>The good:<\/p>\n <ul>\n <li>The graphics.\u00a0 Doing everything in Inkscape really turned out well, and other than a few slight glitches where certain tiles get drawn over others, I think it looks really polished.<\/li>\n <li>The &#8216;connect the lamps to lightboxes&#8217; mechanic.\u00a0 Particularly the moment when you activate a lightbox and the sky gets lighter as it plays the &#8216;light-up&#8217; sound.\u00a0 That&#8217;s a great moment.\u00a0 And I think the mechanic has a lot of potential.\u00a0 If I&#8217;d had more time I would have definitely made the level bigger and more complex.<\/li>\n <li>Doing the level editor first.\u00a0 Getting this out the way before I did anything else really made things easier for me than if I&#8217;d done it the other way round.\u00a0 Once it was up and running all I had to do was implement the game logic for navigating round the level.\u00a0 Incidentally, I didn&#8217;t use up anything like the maximum space in the level (the full size of the level is 1024 x 768 tiles, which is pretty huge), so there&#8217;s scope for other people to make better ones&#8230;<\/li>\n <li>Building a complete (if a bit slight) platformer in 2 days!\u00a0 I&#8217;m still grinning about this&#8230;<\/li>\n <\/ul>\n <p>Now for the timelapses.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve actually got 2, because I did the music and sound fx on a different computer (my laptop&#8217;s not set up for making music), and I didn&#8217;t bother joining them together.\u00a0 First, the main one:<\/p>\n <p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=-bErGpfBHC4\">Ludum Dare 15 Timelapse 1<\/a><\/p>\n <p>And the music one (this takes place between 10:30 and 12:00 on the Sunday):<\/p>\n <p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=_EFaz2Nd0Ac\">Ludum Dare 15 Timelapse 2<\/a><\/p>\n \n <p>Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/tag\/timelapse\/\" rel=\"tag\">timelapse<\/a><\/p>","time":"August 31st, 2009 12:00 pm","title":"Post Mortem, Timelapse(s)"}