(Note: Pictures will be added when I am not blocked from twitter and the images I posted there)

So this dare, Ludum Dare 30 was my first time submitting a game to the competition. Not only that, it’s also one of the first times I’ve tried to make a game on my own. Most of my previous work was either very simple and not much of a game, or it’s been in a team of some friends. I had such a clever idea too, make a platformer that progresses from a hellish place, to paradise as the player works off their sins. However I never made such an elaborate game, I started 5:30 am on Saturday and planned to possibly stay up all night and work on it Sunday. As I worked on it, I eventually realized that my engine was going to be far too slow and I quickly jumped to libGDX. I got up and running pretty quickly. Then I hit a brick wall, I’ve never made a platformer. Ever. Not even a side scrolling, or tile based game of any sort.

[Picture of progress at that point]

I quickly decided that I would give up the scrolling movement and do one screen sized levels. Then it came to collision detection, collision detection was simple, I already had the code for the bounding boxes done, but I didn’t know what to do. How do I handle the intersection of player and npc, or player and moving platform or still platform even. So I took a glitch in one of my attempts to do the calculation, turned it into the win mechanic and cleaned up the background a bit. I finished the game about 12-1am and woke up very tired on Sunday to finish homework

[Picture of finished product]

So while I resign myself to learn platformers, and improve my graphics abilities and the like, it shows a clear lesson to be learned. Have a basic kind of game in your ability to make, know basic physics and collision code, don’t write an engine if you need alpha compositing to be complicated.

[Picture of work environment]

I don’t know what I’m going to do next competition, maybe I’ll try to make it with Unity, which I am not a fan of because I can’t use C++ and don’t really know how it actually works internally. I might use a C++ framework like SFML to handle the higher speed I need. I will definitely be able to do physics and a platformer in any language, but I may try and embrace some of the “magic” provided by engines that abstract away the actual work of programming.

Expect a better game next year, and please post comments of your favourite articles on physics, collision detection and handling, and platformer creation. The more language agnostic the better.

Our team thinks we have a pretty good strategy, we’re gonna have it be like a final fantasy fighting game where you fight using menus. However the weapons are the body parts of your defeated enemies. Should be able to make this really interesting, especially if we add in additional mechanics for power-ups and special attacks that create rare “drops”. Our plan is sound, now for the code and the art/sounds.