No excuses! I didn’t get this shit done and that’s all on me.
Now, an excuse. FlashDevelop crapped out on me this morning, and it took several hours to get it to compile anything again (I’m bad at mornings, which made the problem worse.)
Anyway, I do plan to finish it, polish it up, and stick it up on Kongregate at some point, so in the unlikely even that you want to know the second it gets released, you can, like, pay attention to my twitter feed @alternatehamlet
Things I learned:
For fuck’s sake, don’t let your OCD decide what to do next.
The thing about this is that I would rationally realize exactly what the correct thing to do is, but my OCD would override the decisions and bitch and moan until I did what it wanted. For example:
- My OCD insisted I fix a glitch in the music abundant-music spit out. To be fair, it would have been really annoying to lose 59/64ths of a beat in the music when you’re playing a rhythm game, but it was low priority for the minimum viable release.
- My OCD really wanted to have an infinite scrolling background. I didn’t see an easy way to do this in Flixel (though I was pretty sure there should have been one), so I tried to make my own. I got it almost working with a small glitch, so I kept working on it. In the end, I did get it, but again, it was low priority for the minimum viable release.
If you think a tool would be really useful if it existed, it probably exists.
I found out about Spriter at around noon today, after I’d spent a good part of the night hand-skeletoning my sprite guide file, and a good chunk of this morning (while simultaneously working on fixing FlashDevelop) thinking Miku Miku Dance might be a good option for a pose mannequin for my 2D sprites.
Women bare-knuckle fights were pretty popular in the late 19th century, and just like the men did, the women stripped to the waist to box.
I told you this was a list of things I learned. That’s a thing I learned.
I wouldn’t change a thing.
Now, I’ll probably do things differently the next time I attempt to do a game jam, but I still feel that the way I approached this experience was the correct one for me and for this game. My goal was to get good at ActionScript3 in a week, get passable at a bunch of other skills in the same week, and practice getting off my ass, doing something I find interesting, and making a good faith effort to get shit done.
For over a year, I’ve been working as a research scientist for a small unfunded start-up which I co-founded. Said start-up recently disbanded, and, even if it’s not objectively true, I still felt like I have nothing to show for, well, anything ever. This weekend was cathartic. It really was. I have reached catharsis.
Now, my mom is coming into town tomorrow, so I have to go get non-game shit done.
-monika
*The whole thing is a bug.
It’s a deep night here in Kyiv and other teammates is already sleeping (what-a-hell!).
