What went right
I did it! I actually completed a game. I’ve tried making Flash games in the past but always stopped short for one reason or another – and that was my biggest motivation for joining LD, to complete something, and I did that! The fact that it only took a weekend is icing on the cake.
The environment. I used to be a Flash developer in the past but never tried doing anything outside of Flash Pro – after preparing for this competition by reading some game tutorials, I decided to try building something with Flash Builder. FB gave me very few problems and as I expected it was infinitely better for making games.
The concept. Midway through the development I sometimes wondered if the concept I came up with (a puzzle game with awake/asleep mechanics) was good or not. But after I had the mechanics in place and the code that let you interact with things I started to feel that this type of game has a lot of possibilities that I only scratched the surface on. I’d definitely like to make this into a fuller game at some point.
What went alright
My coding. I never really ran into any difficulties while writing the code – no showstopping bugs at least. The only real problem I had was realizing that I was basically trying to write the mechanics for an adventure game from scratch. I figured I’d spend 12 hours writing the game engine and could use the rest of the time to make the game levels and to add to the presentation. Sadly it took about 25 hours to get the game engine in place which left me with only about 10 hours for everything else.
What went wrong
Graphics. The graphics are ass. I thought I would have enough time to make sprites for my character but ran out of time. The rest of the graphics are way below of what I feel I can make. I even came to a stunning realization that I had no idea how to make good looking floor tiles – also I did not understand how tile systems work in games at all.
Presentation. Just another thing I didn’t have time for. The game just kind of sits there and doesn’t do anything to bring the player into the world. I wanted the things in the stage to do things when the player interacted with them – the sink should spout water and make a continuous sound when you turn it on, the toilet should flush etc etc. I also ran out of time for sound and music; having the game be absolutely silent is very unappealing.
Time management. This being my first kind of game jam of any kind, I figured right off the bat I would have to submit to the jam and not the competition. Even with that though I am not sure I spent all my time correctly. Going out drinking with your buddies is probably something I do not need to do when given only one weekend to make a video game from scratch. I also spent like an hour trying to figure out how the UI should look – only to keep changing it during the course of development.
What I am taking away from this
Game development is fun and extremely challenging. I feel like the next time I do this (and there will be a next time), I should come into it more prepared. I am already familiar with my environment to a degree but I would like to have bare-bones code templates for basic games like side-scrolling with jumping, multi-directional overhead scrolling, adventure, scrolling shooter, etc. Maybe this is a bit against the spirit of the competition but I think how interesting a game is can be how it plays with and makes changes to those engines. I also need to learn how to make pixel art and should probably mess around with some sound generators.
In the end I think getting better at game development is just a matter or doing it until you are good, just like anything else. With more practice I think I can improve on things like time management and presentation.
