Timelapse and Postmortem
Well, I’m back from spending last week in LA at the siggraph conference. Looking forward to playing all the entries.
Here’s a link to my timelapse video. Thanks to Daz for the ETL screencap program he posted, which I used to make this (plus ImageMagick to add timestamps).
A quick postmortem: I was using this compo as a chance to experiment with Ogre3D, so I didn’t expect to end up with something too polished, but i did hope it would be at least playable, which didnt quite happen.
What went right:
- Ogre particles — easy and they look great.
- Art assets. I tried to focus on the minimum that I would need, and they turned out pretty good.
- Learning Ogre. I learned a lot more this way than just reading docs would have taught me.
- Great theme. I had a lot of good ideas for this one (maybe too many).
What went wrong:
- Camera — I spent a lot of time messing with the camera. Afterwards, i realized I should have just went with a fixed close-to-overhead camera.
- Starting with ExampleApp was more trouble than it was worth. In the end, I wasted a bunch of time rearranging it.
- Too many ideas: The theme generated so many ideas for me, I kept changing my mind and adding things. I should have gone with a straight up tower defense.
- Too ambitious. Didn’t get first-playable until Sunday.
I posted a little list of tips on LD Survival, and ended up ignoring almost all of them. That’s okay, I had a great time and got a bunch of experience with Ogre3D.
A technical note: I was using Ogre’s OpenGL mode during development, and noticed at the last minute that the D3D mode was much faster. So the readme encourages you to use the D3D mode. However, I didn’t realize until afterwards that it blows up after a few minutes, so if you get everything flying off the screen, switch back to OGL. I probably forgot to initialize something.
Tags: postmortem, timelapse