DevLog
–Day 2 morning update:
Over half way through. Pretty much nothing other than the core engine is done, which includes collision stuff, movement & physics, animation stuff, and moving seamlessly between maps.
I know I can finish the engine stuff in time it’s just all the assets, I’ll be able to do an enemy or two and a few rooms, if I go into jam time then I may be able to enlist the help of a friend.
–Day 2 end:
In the morning I started working on getting other entities into the game. After that I started working on giving those entities AI, at first they started going of, some disappearing off-screen forever and some loading new maps because I initially just gave them the same code as the player. Fixed the problems and then actually used them to helped me fix a few collision bugs. I wondered how many of them I could have on a map so I tried a hundred, fine, 200, 400, 600, 1000, 2000, 4000 all worked fine. (testing this stuff is known as messing around/wasting time)
But their movement was stupid, so I spent a while too long improving the AI, stopped them going near map edges/terrain and smoothing the movement to make them not completely change direction (i.e not go right if they were previously going left etc.). I then added a couple of behaviour types as well as the random motion, I made one type scared of the player and made them flee when close, I then added another type that made them swarm towards the player if they got close enough and the effect was great, I thought they would immediately home onto the player and lock into position but due to the movement smoothing code they circle the player with a very small loop and can be shaken off. I then added a few other fish types (for 5 fish in total) and added a method to just say load x number of this entity and y of this entity instead of writing (or copy pasting) 100 lines of code and sprawled them randomly around the map.
After that I realized I had wasted my time writing a fish simulator 😛 and couldn’t finish in time. Though I thought I might be able to complete it in jam time IF I could get my friend to help.
–Day three
Jam time had begin and I was relying on my friends amazing art skills, but due to other circumstances my friend could only make one map… So while the game features were almost complete there would be no content, so I gave up.
–Hindsight
In hindsight I know why I failed, I made a stupid decision to have fully hand drawn maps which led to me spending too long on the core engine. I then spent too long on making the AI… of the fish… which were merely supposed to be used to make it more aesthetically pleasing/immersive.
The problem with the engine is that all the maps were full images and thus the collision stuff was slightly more complex. Absolutely no idea what compelled me to use hand drawn maps I’m not exactly an amazing artist so making a good map would take up way too much time, though somehow I thought it would be easier to draw a map all in one.
Next LD I shall stick to good old fashioned tilesets for the map, that will reduce programming time costs and asset creation time costs, and remove almost all the problems I had with this LD. I knew that this was going to be my doom about half way through but it was too late to remove all my progress and begin a new.
