I saw that several people have made “post-mortem” summarizes about LD#27, so I also so it. I’m not the kind of person who follow others like sheeps, but community engagement is surely important – even though no one writes comments. 😀
The beginning
Theme was announced at 3:00 A.M. here. It’s kinda late. I took a smaller break before. When I returned I started checking #ld48 tagline on Twitter instantly – since IRC was a complete chaos for me.
Theme is “10 seconds”. Okay! I started planning and making some basic things immediately. Concept was ready for 3:30 A.M., then I started listening to the great Simcity 4 OST to get inspiration.
I stayed up all night, drawing and coding a bit. First issue: I couldn’t implement procedural “island” generating that would have been significantly important. Okay then, I started implementing a simplier procedural generation. That works but way too ugly.
Then I realised that adding enemies who are moving pixel by pixels are harder than I expected. Then I also realised that they should use projectiles, which would be another nightmare to do. It’s 11:00 A.M. and I’m helluva tired.
The born of Hackfield
Going to sleep for a while. Woke up at 2:00 P.M., and felt myself full of energy! Yeah, I don’t consume much energy – yeah, I’m kinda passive and lazy. Anyway, one hour was enough for me to realise that I’m unable to finish the original plan. Went back to Twitter and pass the time away. Then, I enlightened! Simple game mechanics, based on hacking! I created 9 tiles immediately – it took less than 15 minutes and these tiles mean the whole playground.
Concept was created kinda early, so I started designing tile behaviours almost immediately! Procedural map generation was also kinda easy, but you may even notice it in the same, since it’s not a big stuff.
Main elements of HUD were also made around this time. Everything about behaviour were finished before 4:00 A.M. (the 25th hour of the competition) with some additional bugs and improper level generating.
The final 14
Woke of around 11:00 A.M. on the second day. Yeah, I slept a bit more. I fixed the behaviour of dynamic firewall, created the starting sequence, and created some bsic texts for the main menu. Until afternoon, I created the level generations tested all of them (except sclevel6, that is proven to be annoyingly hard and time-consuming since) for the last 8 hours, I had to create all the texts in the game, the behaviour of the main menu, the ending, and adding sounds.
And that’s where thing have really became a pain in the ass.
Boredom & deadline
For midnight, I was ready with every texts and HUD elements in the game. Drawing elements that don’t look silly but also don’t take hours to create was a kinda annoying challange. You know, I get that we have only 48 hours, but it doesn’t mean that everywhere should we use Arial font, thrown to the edge of the playground! At least I think, and even Hackfield was made with this philosophy. Writing the story was a different problem. I loved imagining the whole thing, including history, received e-mails and Hackfield Daily articles – but after writing all of them (including the tutorial) my short-term brain cells were totally depleted. It makes me a bit stressful while that, which was proven to be critical after midnight.
When I was finished with everything, and I added intro triggering again, I realised that intro is triggered each time when you leave a level. Nothing, and by this, I mean NOTHING solved this problem. I was there at 2:00 A.M., one hour before the deadline with a game that has no sound effects, and constantly triggers its intro sequence.
For a final solution, I added a new timechecker variable, that was proven to be a right solution, but acts like a bulletproff metal plate connected by bubblegums on an armoured tank. (I fixed it after the deadline anyway) Finally, I added sounds and checked everything could – with this fact, I was finished at 2:30 A.M. Then I created the .exe from the .love file, but sadly, I screwed it up 2 times. Because I’m dumb.
Fortunately, I could post the game at 2:45 A.M. with links, pics and the description. Small graphical- and bugfix was posted once since.
Overall
The game was created under ~26 hours, but it includes Facebooking, Twittering, etc. Pure coding would be around 20 hours, as I estimate. I was kinda slow, but I also proud of myself since I’ve never done game with so simple gameplay mechanics.
Including the random computer name generator (which is kinda silly, with combinations like “Gas station supercomputer”), source code of Hackfield is 222+24+281+122+294+696=1639 lines long, including embarraing amount of enters and empty lines to make it easier to read. Longest file is the one that contains ending sequnce, intro sequence, menu behaviour and all the displayed texts. Shortest one (after Lua config file) is the name generator, which contains 3 tables of possible words in the name. If they’d have been separated to a custom file, the name generating function may have been put to main.lua.
I got critics for:
– 1280×1024 fullscreen mode that didn’t work properly on some computers
– the not obvious tutorial and consequently the not obvious gameplay
– logblocks which behaviour is not clear
– the tiles which are too similar and hard to notice certain elements between them (it was kinda fixed)
– the difficulty of security level 6
(- I’m surprised that no one mentioned the weird name generator combos yet)
These critics were significant mostly for gameplay issues, and I learnt from them.
After all, I can say proudly that making Hackfield was a great experience! As I mentioned, I’m seriously proud of the final result and that I could participate to one of the biggest game making jams in the world!
Katamori
Tags: post-mortem
