Sorry to anyone who took the time to rate my “game”.. I knocked it up in about an hour before submission time to show a proof of concept.. But it was unfair to ask for ratings for that. I apologise!
So what happened?
Day 1:
On Saturday, I caught the theme and had an idea for an arcade brawler. I was really keen on teaming up with someone, and my friend eventually gave in and said he’d give it a go.. He still wasn’t that convinced to be honest! The august jam always happens to be on my mums birthday, so after some Illustrator work drawing the parts for the dog, I had to travel 3 hours to see her, then take her out shopping for 4 hours.. By then it was about 8pm.. I went over to my friends, and sadly his girlfriend was ill, so we tried not to get in the way too much.. After some much needed guitar solos, we had about an hour of drunken whiteboard brainstorming where he added:
Zombies
Angels fighting demons in the skies
Army guys shootin everyone
Tanks
Helicopters
The dog is a zombie, with spikes and stuff.
Hellhounds trailing lava like everywhere, and if you touch it, you get set on fire.
And the music would be like a blues version of Thriller.
I managed to hold back the bosses turning all 3d and stuff, but by then, day 1 was over, and the requirements list was full loaded.. 
It was not a game.
Day 2:
On the way home, I got some all-you-can-eat breakfast at a Toby Carvery.. Thanks to that and the journey, I finally got home at about 3pm.. So then code could be happenin, son!
I was really keen on working out the animation this LD.. I wanted a skeleton-based keyframe-interpolating animation software.. Because otherwise, entering all those numbers is near-impossible.. Especially where angles are involved.
By the end of the day, I had a program which could have parent nodes of varying sizes and rotations.. Kind of a skeleton keyframe editor really.
It was not a game.
Day 3:
I started work on the nodes first thing in the morning, then I was called into work for about 6 hours.. I resumed work at 6pm and by 9pm I had my first interpolated animation of boxdog running.
That was probably the most satisfying achievement, as until that point, I didn’t know if the interpolation would work.
After animation, I made a tool which snipped parts of a jpg image and set those to names. Then I altered my code to use those. it was 00:15 on Tuesday, and I was running out of time.
I made a ready animation, a walk animation (which took the longest), and a jumping animation. It was 2pm. Oddly, the contest was revealed at 3am, but ended at 2am, so I was a little surprised to say the least.
Hurriedly, I did the following:
I copied enough of the code to make the animations work into a new JFrame
I tweaked one of the objects to only be visible under certain condition.. The laserbeam eyes when walking.. I found that the coolest part to be honest.
I cutout some of the concept art for the dinosaur in gimp
I made current animation switch to jumping when W was pressed
walk animation on D (moving closer to dinoboy when D was held down)
and S to go back to the idle animation.
I also made space activate laser eyes, and then the energy runs out over time.
It was not a game..
But if you used your imagination, you could imagine the technology turning into a nifty streets of rage clone..
What went right:
I managed to cobble together enough animation software to interpolate keyframes, which is pretty awesome. I’ve spent a few hours working on it since.. So I can create animations by clicking different keyframes in a list, then compile and test them straight away, then adjust the keyframe timings in the window, rather than notepad. Ideally, I would get it to a usable state so my nephew could make his own animations. My sister and I animated a dancing scarecrow with sound effects, which was pretty fun, so I think this might be more interactive and usable than most of my games.
Animation is usually the last thing I focus on, usually by swapping out two images.. This is quite labor intensive, so I’m glad I ventured into learning about skeletons, etc.
I am also glad I got to show my friend some of what game development is about. It would have been better if I had some code ready by the time we met so he had something tangible to get excited about. In future, I will have the animation software to create any animation resources required.
What went wrong:
All my responsibilities totally got in the way. I had places to go, people to see! Now I have work to do and then sleep to sleep! I’m sorry I didn’t review any games (boo hiss).. I saw some real exciting screenshots and dev diaries while people were developing, and then it was back to work.
