'I was a teenage Hipster!' - Post Mortem

So this was my second LD – I’ve been obsessed with making games for a long time now (fair to say I’m very likely in similar company ) and this was the perfect way to continue to learn more about the process. Like many recent newcomers I found out about this whole thing through Notch (thanks!)

What went right:

• choosing python – wow I am blown away by just how fun it can be to code in this language; it’s very intuitive so even though I’ve only been using it for a couple weeks it felt very comfortable to get into.
• pygame – makes simple game development a joy
• putting a more wacky spin on the game – my last entry was very simple in terms of story and I didn’t want to repeat that. This time I put alot more time into the writing, fleshing out the setting and plot without coming across as overly verbose, tightening the dialogue, etc. I had alot of fun coming up with the various snide/cynical quotes uttered by Trevor at the beginning of each level and upon picking up special items.

• py2exe – first off I wanna say I still really appreciate that this module exists, without it I’d have no real chance of sharing my game with anyone not running python. But it does seem to possess a few bugs or atleast quirks that you have to be aware off in order to get it to work correctly in conjunction with pygame. It’ll do things like not bundle certain DLLs required by your application which you have to do manually. Normally this would be no problem but the added time pressure of LD makes it all the more challenging.
• time-management – my initial vision for the game was ambitious (atleast for my skill level haha) and while I did end up finished about 95% of the features I wanted to include, I missed the 48-hour deadline in the process and had to submit under the jam. What’s frustrating is that if I had just been more disciplined with my approach I’d have stood a good chance of making the first deadline.
• too much caffeine – ‘oh there’s two hours left till deadline and I haven’t slept for twenty hours and have already consumed enough tea for a week? Haha that’s not important give me another cup wait why can’t I feel my face?’

Anyway I’m looking forward to LD22, if anyone knows of a good language/platform for quick and easy deployment to the web I’d love it if you would share your knowledge , I’m leaning towards flash but am confused by all these frameworks like Flixel, FlashPunk, etc. and which is best for what. Thanks for reading!

(It’s 20 cause you start at 0)

Alright, real last minute but I’m back for my second LD. Back in April I missed the deadline for the main entry and had to submit under the Jam, this time however I’ll be aiming to finish within the two days.

I’m learning Python so this would be a good opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. I keep hearing about how Python programs are in the order of 2 – 4 times smaller than Java programs and ~10 smaller than c++ programs so I’m sure I’ll have like 80% of the game done in the first hour. In fact if I type game.create(“2d”, “THEME”) it’ll probably do it for me.