I’m done. I have not finished my game but the last thing I want to do now is programming. All the motivation is gone and so are fun and excitement. Yesterday I worked for about 20 hours and today for about 12 hours and the ‘thing’ I managed to create by now doesn’t even deserve to be called a ‘game’. What was the problem? I don’t really know.
My progress so far: A nice working base for a game. The game itself isn’t really existing: 2 halfway working levels (including solid, non-solid and ladder tiles … at least they worked!) and the player’s character that doesn’t do anything but following your keys (no jumping and stuff like this) – that’s not really a game.
What went wrong? As said before: I can’t say, but there are some things I want to change in the future:
- doing the warm-up
- planning the program: I went straight on to the programming. In the beginning I wanted it to be a shooter, many hours of exhausting coding later I thought the theme would fit better to a simple puzzle game, but when I saw I wouldn’t finish on time, I changed everything to a “do this – do that – press this button – use that item” game. If I focused on a single game idea from the beginning I would be cheering right now. All in all the programming was a waste of time.
- paying more attention to graphics: Until some hours ago I just used my dev sprites (grid maps, hitbox sprites etc.). When I finished the first level I already had a bad feeling about the time. When I began with the second level some time ago, I thought about giving up.
- structuring the code: Because this is my first LD I was extremely stressed from the beginning and just did the code. If a teacher or a professional looked at it, they would commit suicide, that means: One big main function and a bunch of structs without methods, getters/setters and inheritance.
It’s really a pity that everything worked out as feared. I wasted my weekend sitting in front of a computer and doing useless stuff.
If anybody cares, here are some screenshots of my dead birth:
(That weird rectangle with zeros and ones is a byte. Yeah, you are playing a byte.)
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text-align: center;
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border: 2px solid #cfcfcf;
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#1 and #2 show The Byte in a nightly city, the first and only working level.
#3 shows a devmap. Yellow tiles are ladder tiles, black tiles are solids and the pepper marks the end. (the map is called “The Outskirts” because it was supposed to be an extension of the first map, before I gave up)
Hopefully this post can help someone, otherwise it would be another waste of time.
See you in the next LD48, aVoX.
