http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview&uid=7131

First Ludum Dare for me, i’ve been meaning to join in but always ended up busy during the weekend it came up…though even this weekend was no exception. (was out of town most of saturday)  Interesting experience though, I don’t think I’ve ever rushed quite this much to write anything….normally at work we’d have at least 72 hours to finish a major project

Overall I was pretty happy with the results, I’ll be honest in saying that the theme was total bunk, it’s too vague of an idea and 99% of the games in the list (mine included) are stretching it about as far as possible to make really anything work on the theme. Would be nice in the future if themes were limited to physical objects or gameplay mechanics.  /minor complaint

What Went Right?

- Time : I picked an idea that I had more than enough time to work on with my additional constraints, it was a little close at the end due to all the things I did wrong… but I didn’t really have to rush to get done (though i did have to cut back on how much artwork i did)

-Choice of api’s: I’m glad I picked SDL to use, as I’m very familiar with it, and sticking with plain old c++/SDL let me take quite a few “shortcuts” I wouldn’t have known in other languages. (bad if this were a real project, but good for saving time)

What Went Wrong?

- sound & art : I’m not COMPLETELY unskilled with sound or art, but it does take me forever. In retrospect I should have just shot for super low res and claimed it “retro” styled instead of using the higher res that I did, which, in not having time, led to a very messy, poorly drawn look

- porting: I didn’t realize that ports were allowed to happen after the deadline, so I wasted a good 4 hours of my 20 actual hours I had to work on my entry trying to get the windows port to compile properly (turned out I needed to upgrade mingw’s toolchain, mine was too out of date for the SDL build i was using)

- tools: I should have choosen tools ahead of time, i didnt even think of sound or music till I was nearly done, and at that point i spent a good hour or two of my precious dev time installing lmms, sfxr, and learning how to use them.

Also, here’s a nice set of videos of gameplay and my dev timelapse.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 19th, 2011 at 7:09 pm and is filed under LD #22. 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.