Here’s my timelapse … it wasn’t all that exciting so I added a little running commentary.

LD#12: pansapiens timelapse

Congratulations to everyone who participated. I can wait to see what y’all have created ….

Some post mortem thoughts

• Use remotely hosted version control. My Subversion/Trac server runs on my workstation … which left me without access to my code when we had a several power failures. If the code was remotely hosted, I could have quickly found some electricity and Internet access somewhere else and continued working on my laptop.
• Take some time to think through implementations, write some notes.. I fairly quickly got a good idea for a two-player falling block game, where players competed to build the biggest tower, but could lower their opponents tower by shunting across matching blocks, which would annihilate each other. But I failed to think through exactly the best approach for the falling block game engine. I coded and discarded about three related but similar approaches, toyed with using the pymunk physics engine for a while (couldn’t get static Polys to stay still though …??), before basically giving up on the falling block engine after the second power failure. If I’d sat down and really thought the engine through before coding, I probably would have finished the game I originally intended to make.
• It’s nice to have a fallback. Normally, I would make my fallback plan something like “okay, no time left, just polish now … no new features”. But that assumes you have a turd to polish. In this case, all I had about 12 hours and a useless pile of crap falling block engine that I didn’t understand anymore. Writing an Atari 2600 game would be a crazy ‘fallback’ if it was done in the traditional way: assembly language. Luckily, batari Basic is pretty much like a normal version BASIC, just more restricted (with a slightly fussy, touchy preprocesser/compiler). It’s been years since I coded in GWBASIC … but you never forget the basics
• It’s about writing a game from scratch in 48 hours and having fun. (and maybe owls). I did have fun this LD, but I also stressed out a little bit too much for something that was supposed to be mostly fun. The power failures were putting me on edge .. even so, I’ve gotta relax and ease off on the coffee next time.

Tags: timelapse

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 2:11 am and is filed under LD12 - The Tower. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.