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Rocket Man Stan postmortem
Posted by JoeCool17
December 20th, 2011 3:55 pm
So, I was very exited to be able to do this year’s LD, this has been my second one. Last time I did it with a freind, our entry was Dwarflings. This year, I decided to try LD48, but unfortunatley due to something that popped up last-minute (literally) I had to move it to the Jam. I had a few frustrations jumping right into Flixel 2.5, which I had no idea would be so different, but they were resolved fairly easily.
(Here is my entry if you’d like to see it and rate it. (hinthint))
What went right:
- Sprites - I’m quite impressed with what I was able to do this time compared to what I did in LD21. My walkcycles still need work, but they’re better. Also, I’m no longer getting artist’s block when drawing characters. I drew Stan pretty quickly, much to my surprise.
- Programming - I think I did pretty well here, just needed a refresher here and there, kept the Flixel reference handy for getting used to 2.5, I’m thinking of writing a tutorial on my code, as it’s good, and Siefer Tim’s excellent platformer tutorial is long outdated.
- Time – Considering I took way too many breaks and started the compo at 2:00 PM ET on Saturday, I still finished, and almost had it done in time for the compo.
- “Feel,” moving – I think I nailed this. Since the game takes place on the moon, I needed to make you feel like walking on the moon, which resulted in great, realistic, high jumps, slow walking, sliding, etc… I’m really happy with how this turned out
What didn’t go so peachy:
- Bugs - As I learned Flixel 2.43, I was caught off-guard by how many changes there were in 2.5, and this resulted in many aggravating bugs that resulted from using old/depricated methods, and fixing these took a good 4 hours out of my time.
- Distractions – Minecraft, TF2, Patriots games, I didn’t really do well dividing my time between game-making and game-playing/watching. ‘Course, I was never good at that.
- Putting things off that I shouldn’t have - I put off the menu and SFX until the last minute, and I didn’t have time to get the SFX in, and the menu just barely scraped on. I had to cull an attract mode I wanted it to have due to time. Had I done this, I think it would have made my entry that much better.
- Guns and Bullets - As you can see, Stan has a gun. But of course, he can’t use it. This was the plan, to add it in and add enemies that shoot, but I didn’t have the time to add a shooting enemy, and therefore didn’t bother with the bullets
What could have been better, but I’m not worried about:
- Level design - The level feels too short, and there’s a lot of wasted space and useless jumping.
- Tilemap - I think I overdid the craters on this, it feels like there are too many.
So, the good and bad negate each other, and there are a few things I wished I could have done but didn’t. But I still think I came out ahead, I had fun and made a decent entry. What’s more important than that?