Cavern Chase – Postmortem/Words on development
This is going to be short and sweet. because my Model M makes a racket and it’s nearly 3AM.
About the game :
Well it’s the second ‘game’ i’ve made this year, it’s simple and has that one-more-go factor to it(at least in my opinion).
Things that went right :
Oh, So much went right and I was overjoyed when they did and it was finished and it actually ended up being pretty righteous. sound was nice and easy to do, graphics took the longest(the playersprite mostly – I was pretty lazy when it came to the floor tiles. Coding was fairly easy, the generation of the floor was a bit tricky but I got it in the end and was amazed when it all worked without a hitch! Scoring and highscores were easy to do, you get 1 point per step(~60pts/sec) and at 100,000pts(add : it’s actually about half an hour) something the world changes.
Things that went wrong :
Oh god the collision was a nightmare. The way i’d written it was everything except the score was moving at 2px a frame left, and Game Maker doesn’t like to do collision very well with moving objects because they are notorious for making the object stop without warning. This of course, led to problems with making gaps in the platforms. I think I completely squashed it though, but I think it might come back in a very very rare case.
ADD: People have commented about the logs that materialise out of nowhere, and they were a hacky bugfix that allowed me to get away with just randomising the floor/fire generation and letting it run wild(there’s a 25% chance of getting a fire tile) as anything more than a 2-tile jump is impossible(note : all two tile jumps are possible, anyone saying otherwise just got unlucky.).
Final Words :
I had a lot of fun coding this. Small games are easy to make, can sometimes be horribly addictive, and a big rush when people like them 
My personal highscore is 20,171 – try to beat it!
I’ll definately be doing this again.