What went wrong

Graphics – I didn’t have a plan for creating graphics, nor a pipeline for doing so. I ended up finding and using a for-kids drawing program, which was just as advanced as I needed, but if I had put more thought into it I could have tried to create something more original.

Preparation – I had used Java2D to do some moving of an image on a tiled background, but I stopped short of using the color key to make it transparent, (wrongly) assuming it would be trivial. I still don’t know how to do it, and I wasted about an hour trying to get Java to make the background transparent, when I discovered that if I saved it as a gif, I could make it transparent using Gimp. That was work that didn’t need to be done during the competition, and it burned me out on learning for a few hours.

Motivation – I don’t know what concrete steps I could do to improve this, but once I had a level up that mostly worked, I had very little motivation to improve it. I was concerned about getting something playable enough to enter, so when the keyboard controls were easier than I expected, and the graphics rendered fine, I was not prepared to tackle the next hardest problem, because I couldn’t see what it was. I now wish I had a project plan that prioritized tasks and had estimates of time and effort, because it didn’t seem worth it to do better graphics, or add more levels, or add more variety since it was such a relief to have gotten that far.

In that sense, I definitely could have worked more on my entry, but I ended up taking back some time that weekend for doing real life stuff. I don’t regret it, but it did make my game less finished and less fun.

Not taking hard problems seriously – I don’t know why, but I slapped in collision detection long after I put up walls and the player. This was dumb, and my solution was even dumber. I strung a bunch of if-then statements together, and instead of making sure a move was legal, I just undid it in the collision code if it turned out to be illegal. This resulted in passable, but buggy collision detection, and only got worse when I added stair cases and vertical walls separating floors and doors. It also made the player jumpy near walls, since the player was moving, possibly being drawn, then moved back when the wall was determined to be hit. I should have wrote tests for what needed to happen, and then write a sensible way of dealing with obstacle management.

What went right

A good start – I made my design quickly, and sketched out an entire level before I started coding. Then, when I started coding, I didn’t need to make design decisions that could slow me down. I had the tower up in about 10 minutes, with a moving player who couldn’t pass through walls in another 30. That was great motivation, and allowed me to incrementally improve my game, which was great for my morale.

Preparation - I used Java2D a few times before, but in the 3 weeks leading up to the competition, I made 3 separate projects with it. This really helped me understand what things were doing, rather than going the cargo cult programming route. Also, eclipse was ready, I had a basic Java WebStart XML file so I didn’t have to mess around with it, and I was loading my resources in a WebStart-friendly way. All in all, the time between my first successful build of my game and my first successful WebStart deployment was very small.

Conclusions

I have definitely learned that it is far easier to improve upon an existing product than to nitpick about design and implementation before anything actually exists. So, I am a convert to rapid prototyping.

Overall, I learned a lot about making a game, and my code is now a perfect candidate for some serious refactoring and test writing. I’m looking forward to improving my entry, and building on the idea.

Finished! Play through Java WebStart here:

http://codebynumber.com/projects/ld12/Game.jnlp

There are two levels, and you can win or lose, depending on your skill in (dun dun DUN) snatching the owls! Think of yourself like a bird-loving Indiana Jones and it all makes a little more sense.

It works in the Compo Game Loader, and you can pull down the zip that includes the source, screenshot, thumbnail, gameinfo.xml, etc. at:

http://codebynumber.com/projects/ld12/towerzip.zip

To play it, go to the link at the top of this post, don’t use the zip. This zip doesn’t include the bugfix of August 12, so the second level is not playable (sorry!).

It’s been lots of fun, thanks everyone! Can’t wait to play all these games!

As for the game, I think I am adding locked doors so that the key can go to something next.

I woke up a little late, and I have a thing to go to in an hour. When I left my computer last night, I stupidly said “I should see if I can get my resolution higher on my monitor” and went in and mucked things up big time. After 20 minutes, nothing worked and when it rebooted, I was in 640 x 480. I went to bed and tackled it this morning, but nothing was working. Finally, I realized the KVM switch was probably interfering with the autodetect or something, so I routed it all to my linux box and it now works. Unfortunately that means my Windows box is now headless, and that’s where I keep my Civ IV! Maybe I need a better KVM switch… Maybe a need a bigger apartment so I can have two monitors and keyboards.

Progress is going well. I have introduced an animation thread into my game so it’s not turn-based. The rendering is spotty – the player flickers just noticeably enough – but there is a lot of improvement I can make in the rendering code. Right now all sorts of things happen in the paint method, which should go elsewhere.

The camera switches direction every 1.5 seconds (it’s supposed to be a security camera). Collision detection still works, which is never taken for granted. Next thing I will do is package it up as a JNLP so I can put up a demo.

You lose the game when you get spotted by the camera:

But there is no way to win it. The key is going to go to a door. The premise is something like “You wake up in a building, not knowing why you’re there.” And so on.

In other news, it turns out poblano peppers are hot and the oil, which I now know is called Capsaicin, feels like liquid fire on your skin. Not when you’re handling them, mind you. Hours later, when you’re sitting, typing at your desk, for instance. And not fire like smoking fire. More of a smoldering, starts little and grows gradually until, 20 minutes later, you realize what’s happened. I did wash my hands thoroughly, but I think I had gotten oil on the dish towel, which then stayed on my hands. So that’s a new hurdle for me, coding while my fingers are burning. Thankfully, it’s gone now, and with any luck, I will never do that, ever again.

The game is coming along. The lines that make up the tower all behave like walls, and the staircases finally behave like staircases! Meaning that you can use them to get between floors. This is great progress, and I’d be really happy if only I didn’t know all the hacky stuff that’s going on behind the scenes. I’m actually thinking about writing some unit tests for the collision and game logic code, since it was a really touch and go process to get the stairs working correctly.

My dog is dying for some attention, so we’re going for a walk, and I’m going to consider what to do next. The easiest thing would be to add items to pick up (keys for locked doors, I’m thinking). But the most technically difficult would be enemies patrolling the floors, since it’s entirely turn based at this point (I only draw when a key is pressed). So I would have to add an animation thread to get something moving on its own.

The little stick figure is the player, and right now it goes back and forth and up and down, with reckless disregard for walls and viewable areas. Next up: collision detection.

Read on, for more trials and tribulations of the first 13 hours…

I wasted about an hour trying to get Java to handle the transparency of a color key, and learned quite a bit about image filtering, but it looks like that wasn’t the way it would work. So I regrouped and figured out that I could say the transparency in the image using a GIF, thus saving myself the hassle. I think it’s fair to say that this is lesson learned #1.

Also, I suffered my first keyboard fatality of the weekend. Well, I guess it’s more like keyboardslaughter, since I willingly popped off the keys to get some gunk out that was sticking the arrow keys. The keys are those fancy scissor keys, so I think I broke a plastic tab or two in the process, and by the time I realized it had happened, I broke another tab on the same side. So the down arrow is about 3 mm higher on the right than on the left. That, and some splotching backlighting (it’s illuminated) after a cider spill a few weeks ago, and I think it’s time that it be retired.

And here’s my pre-grocery snack. I’ve started in on the caffeine already…

Edamame beans, yum! And FreshDirect better get here with my groceries within the hour, or I’m going to be eating raw spaghetti squash for lunch.

I think I will go ahead with my current design, because I’m committed to not being tied to it when I want to change stuff later. I will try to reconsider the game after each feature, so hopefully I can push it towards a better design without spending a lot of time up front. Also, if I finish all the features today, I can always dream big and keep going, right?

And now, for the breakfast:

Yogurt, granola bar and juice for me. Wellness Super 5 Chicken for Max The Dog.

If it looks like I’m working in a closet, that’s kind of true. My apartment doesn’t have closets, so, ultimately, it is a closet.