Unfortunately, I couldn’t finish in time… in fact, it’s still not finished, but I’m aiming to have it finished by Friday ( and certainly by 2nd May as I’m using it for AI coursework now, and that’s when it’s due. )

So, what went wrong?

Point One : My engine was a bit less useful than I had hoped.
It required ( and still does ) extensive amounts of work on to get something done, which scares me as I’ve been working on the engine for most of the year as my Honours Project, and there’s a hell of a lot of code in there, but to get it to do much game logic, it required a lot of work to the Entity classes and managers.

Point Two : The idea was a bit too ambitious.
The idea was that you’d “influence” the development of a community of shapes - the circles or squares. You couldn’t directly control them, but could assign them tasks from their basic pleb-like status to Attacker, Defender or Healer.
Plebs came in Male and Female forms, and hunted out the opposite gender to mate, increasing the population.
Attackers would actively seek out enemy units to attack.
Defenders would actively block enemy units that came near.
And finally, Healers would sacrifice their energy to top up every other unit’s energy.
Once given a task, they could not be influenced again.
Of course, this meant writing AI for each of these tasks as well as a CPU AI for the other player…

Point Three : Hardware Being Stupid
My laptop was being interesting and in the final two hours, it hard locked.
I would have been able to submit a basic version of it - with the Pleb AI running around and doing it’s thing - if my laptop hadn’t decided to bail on me in such a way that it wasn’t until half an hour AFTER the competition finished that I finally got the thing up and running again… by which point I was rather miffed at the thing and decided just to go to bed.

But what went right?
Point One : GL Renderer implemented!
I met my goal for implementing the GL renderer to the engine. Course there’s not much configuration from script side as I was trying to get it done quick to use for LD11, but it’s there

Point Two : The Scripting actually WORKED!
This one is a biggie as it’s the whole point of the engine.. there was actually enough exposed to Lua to get the Pleb AI doing it’s thing. There was a downfall I noticed here in that the Lua->C Stack was getting severely hammered which caused devastating performance hits, but that’s somewhat straight forward to fix by getting Lua to handle more data by itself rather than asking the engine to do everything, and requesting co-ordinate data for every entity, every frame, multiple times.

Although I didn’t get anything finished, I still managed to get a lot done in the time.. and I will be finishing the game off
At the moment, it’s interesting just to watch the Plebs run around and do their own thing.. Lua does sometimes freak out with the amount of data it’s having to shift, making some of them “explode” and move towards the camera, rather than hunt out another mate. And due to the rather standard C pseudo-random number generator, the majority of the Plebs congregate in the centre of the level somewhat, like a mass of worms.

Well done to everyone that did get something finished in time!
It was amazing sitting in IRC and watching the blog as progress was made on everyone’s projects, and there looks to be a number of really interesting games coming from this.. unfortunately, mine wasn’t one of them, but I’ll be posting binaries and all source by the end of the week when it’s finally finished - just for anyone interested in what I got up to

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