Ludum Dare 22: Afterglow

So, LD22 Compo is over. The judgement begins. My entry was Astronaut Alone (play/rate) which ended up being, basically, a rubbish asteroids clone. It was great fun to create though.

Next time, I’ll be more prepared… Maybe.

In the meantime, here are some lists of things.

Things that worked well this time

  • Tablets totally rock. Graphics tablets. I used LD as an excuse to buy myself one. They can be found for just over a tenner (OS X drivers) and it made creating graphics a lot faster. I can’t believe I’ve not tried one before.
  • Content generators are really fun to play with (cfxr, sfxr, Autotracker-Bu). I think I may spend some spare time creating a few for different purposes.
  • The tight deadline forced me to handle time surprisingly well. Immediacy is a great axe for culling long tasks.
  • I drew an astronaut. It didn’t look entirely shit. This makes me happy.
  • Whisky helps.

Things to do next time

  • Prototype more on paper/other non functional medium.
  • Don’t try to optimise anything.
  • If a coding problem is taking more than an hour, put a hack in.
  • Play with general concepts before the compo just to have things in mind. This probably just extends to the fact I should be doing more playful/experimental coding, with no firm gameplay in mind.
  • Drink more whisky.

Game to do list with some things done

  • Necessary:
    • Drifting asteroids
    • Wrap around
    • Destroy asteroid
    • Mine remainders
    • Convert graphics to entities so they can collide
    • Asteroid indicator
    • intro
    • win
    • instructions
    • audio in game
  • Graphics:
    • Astronaut
    • Asteroids
  • Fluff:
    • Smooth wrapping
    • Star trails
    • Asteroid damage
    • Asteroid death
    • Asteroid colouring
  • Refactoring:
    • Pool managers don’t need to give themselves to entities - use the names.
    • Pool managers can probably share a base class - or perhaps the SimpleObjectPool can do more work
    • Refactor text class
  • Bugs:
    • Asteroids can spawn on you

Tools I used this time

In no particular order, pretty much every tool I touched:

Food and Drink sequence:

  1. Coffee
  2. Scrambled egg and tattie scone
  3. Coffee
  4. Coffee
  5. Chocolate mini roll thing
  6. Coffee
  7. Tangerine
  8. Dry frosties
  9. Tiny lindt chocolate things
  10. Aubergine bake
  11. Red wine
  12. Whisky
  13. Toasted cheese
  14. Coffee
  15. Scrambled egg
  16. Coffee
  17. Darjeeling tea
  18. Tablet
  19. Banana
  20. Stir fry
  21. Many freshly baked flapjacks
  22. Whisky

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