The other last foodphoto, and post-mortem
Dinner last night was Chinese.
Clockwise from upper left: cold dish platter (chicken, roast pork, char siew and jellyfish), diced duck in lettuce wrap, roast chicken, tofu mock-meat with veggies, dessert (hard to explain unless you live in Asia), fried shrimp in wasabi sauce, steamed fish, and noodles in the centre. Not pictured: Peking duck and one other dish which I forget - probably veggies of some description, if memory serves.
Hooray for crappy photography skills and almost-as-crappy cellphone camera.
Actually, this was my grandmother’s birthday. Dinner took 4 hours, which kind of put a ding in my development time. Food was good if somewhat “innovative” (roast chicken on top of fruit salad?).
Well, on to the post-mortem.
What I did right:
- I was using very familiar tools.
- Tools were mostly in place before development began.
- I deliberately left out 3D skeletal animation from my toolset. Integrating it would have tempted me to make animated 3D characters, which would have killed the project due to the time required.
- Character sketches at the start gave me a very clear direction.
- Chose to hard-code my level rather than making a more open framework.
- Froze development half an hour before the end of the compo, to avoid running out of time.
What I did wrong:
- Not enough practice with composing music. The first song took 2 and a half hours. The second was half-done in about half an hour. In the end I scrapped music because I couldn’t finish the boss fight theme in time.
- Didn’t build my toolset with quick development in mind. Some features which would have been useful were left out, like sprite animation and object state-management.
- Included toolset features, like lighting, which pushed the game’s specs to a point where some people couldn’t run it.
- Edit: Made the game too hard. I forgot that most people are not shmupfans.
- Attended the birthday dinner. I kid, I kid - making Grandma happy is usually a good thing, and I got a nice meal out of it too.
























































