A couple of my thoughts about my first participation of LD:

Don’t Take the Theme Too Seriously

I think I tried to interpret the theme a bit too literary. I thought the game has to be *about* minimalism, which means that minimalism is not about its styles, but the *goal* of the game. What’s the problem with that? It turned out to be difficult to come up with a game design that is about minimalism but still enjoyable. I thought minimalism always involves some sort of design or structural construction, which is a creative act, so the obvious choice for me is to make some kind of puzzle game. But I didn’t want to make a puzzle game! I wanted to make an action game. So this put me into a dilemma. I spent one hour for brainstorming the basic idea in the beginning, but even after that, I wasn’t really sure what I’m going to do.

The first idea that came to me was a trash compactor. Its goal is to minimize the volume of garbage, and it can be a game. But it didn’t much sound like minimalism, so I came up another idea, which is to design a minimalistic house under some condition (think of an artsy house that modern architects design). I was thinking of something like “Art Game” by Pippin Barr. You push materials around and then “play” on it. And then at some point, the materials turned into food, and some crazy insight told me that I should make a platformer on the top of it. Hence the idea of my game “Controlled Diet” has come into reality.

You cannot Learn Your Tools Enough

I used a combination of Windows + Linux environment (I run Arch Linux on VirtualBox on Windows). I edit and compile on a Linux machine and test it on a Windows machine. I used a vanilla Flex SDK 4.6 and Makefile (Yes, I am very old school). I used a shell and Python interpreter, as well as a set of well-known tools (e.g. ImageMagick). Here are things that I think would be useful if anyone uses a similar environment like mine:

• Get used to Emacs’ Actionscript-mode. There are several versions of it by different authors, and they vary slightly in its highlighting and indentation. Using a wrong one will end up a lot of annoyance.
• Use a debug version of standalone Flash Player, so that you can double-click the build and run it directly.
• Don’t forget to add -debug=true compiler option to mxmlc, otherwise trace() wouldn’t work!
• Use fdb (Flash command line debugger) to siphon trace() outputs to a stdout/file.
• git config --global core.filemode false
• If your machine is slow to launch Java, try using fcsh (Flash compiler shell), which somewhat reduces the startup time of mxmlc (but not by a large margin).

The bottom line is that the more efficient the edit-build-test-debug cycle, the better. Try to spot the bottlenecks as many as possible and eliminate them.

IRC is Helpful

I had been lurking around the Ludum Dare IRC channel for a couple of weeks, and I can tell that this is a very nice place to hang out. You see a lot of people talking about their ideas. At one point I was murmuring about the need of creating a quad-tree implementation that was necessary for my simplistic physics engine. Then someone in the chat said “a quadtree is overkill for this”, and he was right; I didn’t really need a quadtree for only a dozen of objects. Now I want to thank that person. You saved me a lot of time.

Things that Went Okay

• Overall framework. I wrote a generic framework and posted it on github beforehand. This strategy went well. I can start quickly tweaking on a working codebase, and it was simple enough to allow me to change it drastically later on.
• Time management. I put a TODO list on my desktop and tried to update it at every hour. Later I had to reorder things but this helped me greatly to stay focused on what I’m going to do.
• autotracker.py. This is an awesome tool, even more so when you know a bit of Python and how to tweak it. Thanks a lot.

Believe in Your Idea, with Passion

Generally, I think I’m more of an “idea” guy. I wanted to come up with a wacky, eccentric idea and somehow I succeeded in it. I finished my game, and even its not the most fun thing to play, I still enjoyed the whole process a lot. It was a nice challenge, and hope I can do this next time again.

Tags: postmortem