I decided to finally finish start the doodle/mini-LD project from a few weeks ago as sort of a warmup round, and, unlike every other jam/speed-coding/short-dev-cycle attempt I’ve ever made, I actually feel like I’m not a miserable failure this time! Go me!

I’m eighteen hours in, and I’ve managed to go from some really crappy initialization code and an empty directory to a really crappy level editor and previewer, and even a crappily-animated heroine to go with. (I’m slacking off at the moment because I’m waiting for Imagemagick to finish downsampling the contents of my timelapse directory, and I really don’t feel like looking at the project at the moment, so I’m avoiding burnout.)

Things I’ve learned from this little exercise:

1. starting out with a lightweight vegan meal: definitely a huge win (I love cheeseburgers, but let’s face it, they cause torpor like nobody’s business).
2. using workrave to remind me to split my work up into 45-minute chunks so I don’t get burned out or demoralised too quickly: definitely a huge win.
3. while making tools and ‘middleware’ in situ is kind of fun, it is definitely a timewaster.
4. I need to be better at (temporarily) turning a blind eye to things that are inelegant or unpolished during ‘crunch time’.
5. Boning a catgirl: not as much fun as it sounds (see below). That took waaaay too long to make, and it still has a crappy silhouette and z-fights all over the place. A shame…

I think I’m probably going to goof off for the evening at this point, then pick up bright and early tomorrow; 12 hours would be just enough to actually make it into a real game…

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 7th, 2012 at 7:31 pm and is filed under LD #23. 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.