I’m pleased I managed to finish this. Here’s my post mortem.

I spent most of my first day wrestling with a bug in libnds associated with the way it calculates sprite addresses in VRAM. I managed to fix it, but by then I’d lost all motivation for working with the console.

That’s when I started to get a bit … creative with the theme, and really got my teeth into it (no more, I swear). I really wanted to make something that wasn’t cave-based, so I contemplated other things that might be considered cavernous, and thought of mouths.

Gameplay

Overall, the gameplay was close to my original vision. The core gameplay of shooting and healing is all there, I just would have liked to put some more extras into it, like the ability to level-up lasers. I also wanted to make it a lot more silly … but I might do that sometime post-compo.

I quite like the input scheme of mouse-look and X to walk, and C for jumping instead of the more ‘traditional’ WASD. I wanted to make the dentist walk more like a person and not a usual platform-game character – he can’t walk backwards or change direction mid-jump. Some people will hate this, but I thought it suited my theme more at the time.

Coding

I used BlitzMax for the game, which I don’t use very often. However, it was a perfect choice, given the limited time available. It has an incredible range of features built-in, and I doubt that I’d have been able to make the deadline if I’d have to write all the graphics and sound code from scratch again. (Also, SuperStrict is cool.)

Graphics

Using Illustrator for the graphics was an enormous help; I used it to mockup the design and then was able to make sprites from the different visual components. I’d definitely recommend using some sort of vector editor for quickly prototyping visual styles. The only drawback with using Illustrator was the need to manually find the origin of sprites, which was time consuming.

Sound & (lack of) Music

sfxr is really useful for deadlines. I originally wanted to put in some cheesy sounds of pain, but time prevented it. Music was a complete non-starter.

Overall

Although I probably won’t win anything, I really enjoyed my first Ludum Dare. And that’s what it’s all about!

Tags: post-mortem, postmortem

This entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 4:01 pm and is filed under LD #15 - Caverns - 2009. 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.