Smores Attack Post Mortem
I am pretty happy with how Smores Attack came out in the end, although it is not as fully featured as I had hoped. With my first LD done, now I understand the basic issues I am likely to face making an applet game. I have made a bunch of games before, but I hadn’t made a sprite-based, flash-looking applet game in a while, and dealing with the initial graphics setup in Java took the vast majority of my time, effort, and motivation to get through. I had to throw away 2-3 attempts at getting the sprites to render correctly, but finally I achieved success.
Once I had that done, making the game itself was pretty easy and fun. I can see why so many people start with frameworks now, although I think it is really rewarding to not start with one because then my game doesn’t have all this other overhead that it doesn’t need (I’m sure it’s not as optimized as I could make it anyhow, but still it’s pretty small for what it is). The background color change was the smartest move… the characters really pop off the screen with the blue background vs. red. My time lapse shows the heavy editing necessary to draw the animations, many of which I didn’t have time to implement.