This was my first Ludum Dare and I made a game called “Moore’s Game“. It’s basically a journey through the evolution of video games – starting with Tic Tac Toe on a line-printer and ending with a ray-casting first person shooter.

Technology-wise it’s written in JavaScript, using the 2d-context of the HTML5 canvas element.

What went right

Speed – apart from the few times where I got stuck (more on that later), I was working pretty fast. Pong, Breakout and the raytracer for the Wolf3D-like level were done really quickly. It helped that I disregarded every coding best practice in existence. Even though faking namespaces via objects or closures is possible and common in Javascript, I didn’t do that and just put everything into the global namespace. That made for messy code (more on that later) but speedy development.

Although I (think I) was fast, I couldn’t finish everything I had originally planned. More on that later (that’s going to be a big what-went-wrong section, oh my…).

Technology choice – Modern Javascript interpreters (read: browsers) are blazingly fast, given the (security-)constraints in which they have to operate. The canvas API is simple and straight-forward. And the result is playable on every operating system with a modern browser.  What’s not to like about that? Javascript as a language has it’s share of problems, but it’s not too bad. It has really just the wrong syntax for the dynamic, lisp-like language it actually is.

The competition - as I said, this was my first Ludum Dare. I had the most programming-related fun since …ever, really! I also didn’t expect such a cool community. I was on the IRC a little bit, during the competition, and I was stunned how friendly and civilized everyone behaved. It’s the internet, people, you are expected to endlessly insult each other!

No, Ludum Dare is just great – it won’t be my last one!

What went wrong

Scope – that was my biggest problem. I just planned too much features. And while implementing those I had ideas for even more and more and more… I originally wanted to blend the gameplay from one game-generation into the other (that is, playing a bit of a Mario-Bros.-like jump-and-run with Pacman, for example) – but I had just no time for that. The games itself were all simple and small – but there were eight of them.

Which, by my current calculations, were at least seven games too many for a 48h-competition…

Code Quality – let’s not talk about that. This was hands-down the worst code I’ve ever written. I’ve written BASIC on my calculator that was better structured… I just didn’t have time to stop and think. So, copy-and-paste it was, mostly. And brute force. And a lot of “what’s the most stupid thing that could possibly work at least half of the time”.

Pacman- I still don’t know how the hell I managed to get completely stumped by writing pacman. I was on the wrong path, somehow and as a result I wasted much too much time even getting it to the sorry state it’s in now. The ghosts just move randomly, the frame-rate is ridiculously low, it’s buggy as hell. And it doesn’t even look too much like pacman. Not good.

Adventure – The lucas-arts inspired point-and-click adventure level was first planned to be the *cool* level of the game. The one that would pay back for all the bugs in the other levels. Well, no, that didn’t work out. I wrote half of an engine for it, but there just wasn’t enough time – and I didn’t really know how to actually write a point-and-click adventure game engine… So I started that level over – with about 4 hours left – and basically cut down all the features until it was just one big if-else tree. Not good, part 2.

Time management – It’s easy to lose track of just how much work is still to do when you’re working on eight different games at the same time. And losing track I did.

Knowledge – Before I started, I thought that I generally knew how to program all the games I had planned. Well, yes, generally. But what are good jumping dynamics for a platformer? How should I do collision testing? How do I insert scaled sprites into a ray-casted world? By which rules do the monsters move in pacman? I have no idea. Oh, and no time to find out… Not good, part 3.

What I’ll do different next time

I’m going to write one game. Like, one.

1

One! Eins! Uno!

One single, polished, working game that’s fun to play.

Not freaking eight badly made ones…

Thanks everyone!

Ludum Dare 24 was fun!

Tags: postmortem

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2012 at 2:30 pm and is filed under LD #24. 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.