The Fair King, Post Mortem and Time Lapse
I have finally uploaded a time lapse video for my LD26 entry, “The Fair King”. Feel free to watch it here!
Clear the stage by dividing the colors by as close as 50% as possible
For me, Ludum Dare is a chance for me to try something that is out of my usual reality. Game making, art creating, very short deadlines. In keeping with this spirit, I decided that I should move myself outside of my comfort zone, and try a brand new game engine, and a brand new platform. I decided to use libGDX for the first time, and make a game aimed towards the Android platform.
I know that it is not best practice to try out new libraries in the 48 hours alloted by LD, but I wanted this to be a learning experience, so I went ahead with it anyway. Here is the usual “what went well” and “what went poorly” breakdown:
What went well:
- Think 5 ideas, pick the 6th: My game idea became simpler each iteration, until I had an idea simple enough that I could implement in a day.
- Porting to android: LibGDX made porting to android really simple, and it motivates you having your game on a mobile platform
- Image levels: Levels in my game can be stored as images. I used Isopix to work on puzzle levels while I was in the train.
- Version management with Git: I had to rollback the game a few times when I tried to add some functionalities, and Git made it really simple.
What went poorly:
- LibGDX is quirky: You have to use power of 2 textures for portability, the font class is a mess, and different drawing models use y-positive or y-negative axis.
- I’m tired of autotracker: but I haven’t yet learned to properly use any sequencing software for linux. I want to fix this by next LD.
- No playtesting: means that I missed some pretty obvious interface mistakes. For example, I should throw away invalid moves, instead of showing an obvious “lose” screen for these, also it is not obvious where you should begin the line from.
It was fun, and I’m happy with the result. Please give me your opinions here.