Diggydig – Timelapse & Post-Mortem
Hey peeps and thanks for all the lovely comments you made on DiggyDig so far! 
First I want to explain a couple of things here as reply of some of the comments:
I apologize that it is so crash prone, again. My engine is not very stable and i experiment a lot with it. I try to improve that while i work on it, but it is quite difficult to get it to work properly on different machines with all the different hardware configurations. In that respect, ludumdare is the only wide scale test i have available right now, so i am using your feedback to improve this piece of software so it will eventually end up working alright. LD 21 was already a great help there! Thanks for all your input on it.
Thanks for the praise on the game mechanics. It is certainly not unique, but rather borrowed from minecraft/terraria and taken to a slightly different direction. Getting the mechanics work properly actually took most of the time, so i only had a couple of hours left to create the content, which you can observe in the timelapse.
The limited amount of time, i think i had around 6 hours left, is of course the cause for the lack of game depth, versatility, actual content, and everything else basically.
The physics are very hackish. I never coded collision with rastered terrain before, so i am happy that it works as well as it does.
Post Mortem
What went right:
- I got the mechanics and gameplay to the degree i wanted to. I was not expecting to make a stellar entry either, instead i just wanted to fiddle around with this idea.
- Although loading times are terrible, i was able to get a quite big world created from a number of bitmaps. This was actually an important proof of concept, as i plan to use this technique to improve on the concept.
- The music was quickly hacked into like an hour before the deadline. It is not too shabby, so i’m fine with it.
- The overall appearance is not over the top, but okay. It could certainly use more polish but you can see what it is supposed to be.
- I had awesome food.
What went wrong:
- I couldn’t fall asleep on thursday, therefore overslept on friday, and was screwing up my sleeping rhythm just before LD.
- The theme. I was raging all night after the anouncement, and the day after about this ludicrous theme. I was thinking about making a game actually fitting the theme, before i realized it is just too generic to actually make a game of it. Same as Escape was, but this is getting offtopic. Anyways, only got started with the actual project some time saturday afternoon, so i wasted a lot of time actually not working.
- I spent too much time on the tech side of the game. It was not so bad this time because i was trying to get something done i planned to do anyways at some point, but i really should get more gameplay done next time.
Aftermath
I will use the next month to play with this prototype.
I will :
- add dynamic lighting and normal maps to create a denser atmosphere.
- create a 2d Ragdoll animation thingy for teh awesome moves like i already started with as you can see in this basic proof of concept:
- add different kinds of terrain materials, and an actuall surface
- add physics (actual 2d physics) for bridges, elevators, traps, and more
- if the january is still not over by then, I will start experimenting with smooth particle hydrodynamics, or an approximation thereof in an attempt to add realistic 2d liquid simulations. I am not sure how well this will perform, but man, that would be wicked to have
I am not sure in what direction i will take this to be honest. This has an aweful lot in common with terraria, which i don’t like. Don’t get me wrong, i love terraria, but i don’t want to basically remake it. So i will just keep working on this and see what i can make of it. While i have a few hints, i am not fully certain about it.
Thanks for reading, and all your precious feedback!
with love
wzl