Postmortem and crash fix release for GoblinHome
August 31st, 2009 8:47 pmFirst the bugfix release:
GoblinHome 1.0.1 bugfix release
This was my first Ludum Dare and I’mhooked. Last weekend was really fun trying to get a game completed on time. I didn’t get the game I originally envisioned done but I got a good start for it and it does have a winning and losing condition so it is a game.
The good:
Time – I was able to schedule the core game first to result in something playable, even if I didn’t get all that I wanted done.
Blender – It was my first time using blender’s texture painting mode. I was able to make the troll’s texture in blender much faster than I was able to make the goblin’s texture in photoshop. It works very well.
The bad and what I will do better next time:
Blender – It’s been a few months since I modeled something and I forgot a bunch of the myraid of hotkeys and functions and spent time looking them up.
Art – It took 6 hours to make the goblin and 2 hours for the troll based on the goblin. I probably could have used my time better for features by making worse models. Part of this is probably also because I forgot my blender commands.
Photoshop – Photoshop stopped responding to my tablet’s pressure sensitivity right before I created the title and conclusion screens, which was a pain to figure out.
Group selection and health bars – I’ve been getting a lot of comments on these. When it came down to the end I had the choice of group selection, health bars, or a selection indicator for the currently selected goblin. The selection indicator won out as the most needed. The others were next on the list!
Framework – I didn’t have one so I spent a good chunk of saturday writing code to glue ogre, cegui and ois together and make a basic blank screen app. Next time I should make a framework to use to skip some of that.
The crash – There was a crash that took a while to track down that I did not see while developing. If you were to click on the goblin’s selection circle it would crash with a null pointer error. This has been fixed in the bugfix release. The bugfix release also fixed a rather nasty memory leak in the pathfinding which I originally thought was the crash bug but wasn’t.
I was impressed with your 3D models for LD! Working on can often be a big timesink, so I was mostly trying to avoid it for characters this time. Using 3D texture painting methods is a big time saving for projects like this though, I found that before when doing 3D. Congratulations!