My first LD of any kind and I missed the 12pm deadline.

What I did wrong

• Under-tested tools, I wrote the Demina and Opal readers for LibGdx myself – this is the first time they’ve been put to the test. Demina was no hassle, but my implementation of the Opal reader made for a considerable amount of work. Some poor design decisions in custom entity handling lead to constant crashes that while easy to fix were just as easy to miss (thankfully, the crashes were all obvious)
• Using Box2d was a bad decision all around. I explode the jellyfish and barracuda into pieces as well as the bubbles Pistris shoots. At least under JNI situations if you spawn too many box2d bodies too close to each other … crash. I ate 3 hours figuring out that I had to apply these ‘effects’ only one at a time across the update cycles so they had a moment to disperse.
• Undetermined workflow. While Demina works nicely – I had no understanding of how to quickly break apart my mostly flat drawn characters into pieces to use effectively with it. I didn’t figure it out until about 5 hours after Shark-jam ended. Ultimately it was quite easy, but I was not aware of the Photoshop features that made it easy at the time.
• Spent too much time on features that I didn’t really need. I wrote an entire screen filtering system. Initially this was to apply a watery effect over the rendered view … but the itch struck and a few hours later it could render additively, multiply, pan, and distort.
• Working off of a laptop –  I live in a solar powered home so it made sense this time of year but I should have attached a keyboard. I lost time on fighting with a silly scissor switch keyboard layout constantly.

The awesome I took out of this jam

• Converting photoshop layer groups into ‘Group into new Smart Object.’ So amazing.

Ultimately I learned a lot from this first MLD/jam.

My shark-jam code isn’t up there yet but any code I may have used for it is available at www.github.com/JSandusky