A door as envisioned by a post-modern programmer/artist

Ok, here is what happened since my last post.

[OPTIONAL SAD STORY]

I was supposed to start working on the project yesterday after lunch but didn’t find the inspiration and was tired as hell so before writing a single line of code I took a short nap that somehow became a ~3hrs long sleep. I woke up around 6 PM and after coming back to my senses (around 6:30PM) I sat in front of the computer so I could start working on the game. I settled with Monkey as the programming language and made some progress with the code… but as the night fell I started running into some problems. I was not satisfied with the overall implementation of a few things and although I tried a few alternative ways I was not getting the results I wanted. My goal was to finish the game that night so I could spend the few hours I would have available on Sunday to make music/sound and better graphics.  Around 3 AM I discovered (by checking facebook) that DST  was to be resumed that night… so it was 1 hour later than what my clock was telling me. Having my time cut by my “little” nap and the damn DST, and frustrated because I was unable to achieve the results I wanted for the game, I decided to give up on the project.

I woke up this Sunday a bit before lunch, a bit depressed for having abandoned the project.

My sister entered my room and asked me about the competition and I told her I gave up on it last night. I remained on bed a few more minutes and then started thinking on my plans for the day.

I discovered I had nothing better to do, so after a few minutes, I decided to give it another shot at the project. I rescued the files from the recycle bin and started working on it again. Don’t ask me why I did that… I didn’t have a single reason to resume the project… in fact, it was quite unrealistic to even think it was possible to finish the game in the remaining time having already lost like 50% of the estimated time I had. But I was not in a hurry for finishing now… I was .. just curious to see how far I could go with it…

[/OPTIONAL SAD STORY]

I actually got trolled by the clock. I checked the LD page and made my schedule according the remaining time it displayed. I should have grown suspicious that it was still telling me that the compo would end around 10:00 PM despite the DST, but I wasn’t thinking on the DST in that moment.

I managed to finish the game code around 8 PM, so I had like 2 hours to make some music. After trying a few programs from the LD tools page and realizing I didn’t have time to learn any of those I settled with composing the music with my DS (and the DS-10 Synthesizer) and record it on the PC with a stereo cable. It worked fine. I made the special FX with SFXR on my computer.

I wrote the sound manager module and then rebuilt the project. It worked fine except for one thing… background music was not looping. I tried a few things but given the time constraint I ended up giving up on it, leaving only the special fxs.

With like 40 minutes remaining until the end of the submission deadline I uploaded everything to my website and tried it on the browser.  It worked fine except for a minor thing… I was loading resources in the moment you need them, so the first time you face an open door, or any of the game screens, the game freezes for a second or so in order to load the image/sound. BAD.

I coded a quick and dirty image manager class that I could use to keep a cache of previously loaded images. Then replaced all loading calls for cache calls and added a few calls at the beginning of the code to cache the most heavy images (so they were already loaded from the start) and then uploaded the game again. Now it was working fine. As I didn’t write a cache for sounds you may miss a few sounds if they are too slow to load, but that shouldn’t affect the experience.

With only 18 minutes remaining until the end of the competition I finished uploading the game and submitting it into the compo. I was done.

I felt so relaxed that I kicked back and checked the IRC…. only to find that it was still 1 hour and 18 minutes until the end. Damn YOU DST!! LOL.

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TL;DR? Managed to make the game. Don’t ask for the graphics as I had like half the time I was supposed to have (which was already around 1 day total). Had some problems but fixed them (although some compromises were done). Total time was around 8 hours including “art”, “sound”, and “music” (which was not included for technical reasons). Also, I’m bipolar.

HERE IS THE GAME!

P.S: You need to correctly avoid/enter 50 doors to win the game. Good luck with THAT!

Tags: compo, escape, journal, LD21, post-mortem

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 21st, 2011 at 7:41 pm and is filed under LD #21. 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.