Post Mortem, Timelapse(s)
I’m really pleased with how this one turned out (and kind of amazed at how much I managed to get done over the course of two days!). It’s weird how my motivation went in completely the opposite direction to the last one. In that one I started off really excited only to hit a wall on Sunday afternoon, while on this one I started really down (the theme’s caverns? Really?), only for my enthusiasm to ramp up more and more as my game progressed. It took me ages to get to sleep last night, I was so wired from it all.
I’ll start with the bad, because it’s only little things:
- Stupid jumping bug. Platformers really need to have solid collision detection, and mine kind of fell down (ha ha!) there. It’s no good if you’re jumping up to a ledge only to fall through it into the lava below. It only took 5 minutes to fix when I came back to it this evening though. The perils of writing a game in only 2 days…
- The music. I’m not sure it really fits the rest of the game. I was going for an underground, subterranean theme, but I think it’s just a bit too sinister. I should have tried to do something more upbeat.
- The theme. Given all the existing games already set in caverns, I can’t help feeling I would have made a weirder, more interesting game if one of the other themes had won out. Still, given how Caverns of Light turned out, I’m not too fussed…
The good:
- The graphics. Doing everything in Inkscape really turned out well, and other than a few slight glitches where certain tiles get drawn over others, I think it looks really polished.
- The ‘connect the lamps to lightboxes’ mechanic. Particularly the moment when you activate a lightbox and the sky gets lighter as it plays the ‘light-up’ sound. That’s a great moment. And I think the mechanic has a lot of potential. If I’d had more time I would have definitely made the level bigger and more complex.
- Doing the level editor first. Getting this out the way before I did anything else really made things easier for me than if I’d done it the other way round. Once it was up and running all I had to do was implement the game logic for navigating round the level. Incidentally, I didn’t use up anything like the maximum space in the level (the full size of the level is 1024 x 768 tiles, which is pretty huge), so there’s scope for other people to make better ones…
- Building a complete (if a bit slight) platformer in 2 days! I’m still grinning about this…
Now for the timelapses. I’ve actually got 2, because I did the music and sound fx on a different computer (my laptop’s not set up for making music), and I didn’t bother joining them together. First, the main one:
And the music one (this takes place between 10:30 and 12:00 on the Sunday):
Tags: timelapse