Voting is finished and in all regards LD22 is too. I had a lot of fun that weekend in December and It feels about the right time to write a postmortem of the 'game' I created.
What went right
I made a game, yes it is the goal of ld, but damn am I not happy with managing to get something out within 48 hours.
The art work, It was my first time in years using the GIMP for anything and I am really happy with the results. The tileset came out quite well and I am really happy with the sprites. I probably should not have spent as much time as I did making sprites I never used, but I couldnt help myself
Bitmap tilemaps, the tilemaps for the game are a combination of the tile set and a png that stores locations based of the red value in the pixel (0-15 I think). This allowed me to draw maps, but the tools at my disposal did not lend them sevles to it.
What went wrong
Sound, there isnt any. I have never written any sound code before, though this isnt an excuse. Sound was always going to be a ,if time allowed, component. When it came down to the wire I didnt have time to learn.
Game play, The game is really difficult. At somepoint in development I tweaked a variable and it moved from being able to destroy almost all of the baddies, to only managing one if you are lucky. I have looked since and I cannot find the reason, it might be in the collision detection, but I will come to that.
Collision Detection, collision boxes were difficult and once a shape was scaled the box moved away(weird right?). This meant the health pickup actually registered no where near the heart. Enemies and buildings were fine on this front so that is one bonus. I implemented a collison map for the world, but could never get this to work so it was not in the final game. Probably my least favourite bug.
Map loading orienation, I had to do some rotations to get everything lined up and looking in the same direction, but I forgot to fix this for the map meaning everything was all over the shop. I also missed this on the collision map, hence the collision map not working.
Animation, I changed frame on every game loop, meaning that when you walked your legs were going at 60fps with only two frames. Makes animation look really funny, but a silly bug.
Platform, most of my comments were on the lack of hardware for players. This annoyed me when I saw how many games required XNA and windows just to play. If I write an iOS game again I will have a distribution system so jailbroken devices can atleast get a hold of it.
Overall I am happy
Hell I managed to make a game within 48 hours, looking at the code post compo the bugs mentioned are not too much to fix. Next LD I am going to try a desktop game and hopefully figure out my workflow before the compo starts.
