gamejam.org: Teams : TheKranzkyBrothers

Team: TheKranzkyBrothers

gamejam: August0808

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Post Mortem

540 days ago lloydkranzky wrote:

The last two weeks have been so much fun, and I've never worked so hard. Like maxxor, I reckoned I spent between 50 and 60 hours on the project. And I'm so impressed that we've all achieved what we have in what is essentially equivalent to one busy week in a normal job. The fact that we've done it after hours while working on another game during the day is astounding!
I was lucky to have a basic engine up-and-running before gamejam, so I didn't need to figure out how to get Haaf's Game Engine, Box2D and SQLite to play nice together. I went into it wanting to make a mashup of Thrust and Exile, two classic games by Jeremy Smith - Edge Magazine awarded Exile a posthumous perfect score).
I convinced a buddy of mine to draw some pixel art. Sounds were done with sfxr, and the three music tracks are all old Amiga chip mods, all of them CC licensed. I knew I needed turrets to fire at the player, grapple hooks to attach to the urchins to take them to safety, a level editor and so on. However, with the drop-deadline fast approaching, all of that fell to the wayside, and I focused on doing anything that was fun.
The turning point was on Thursday, when all I had was a pretty tech demo; beetlefeet suggested the urchins should drop coins when they were destroyed, and Friday / Saturday just became a rush to implement this, balance the scoring mechanism and polish off the high score table and other menu screens.
That's another thing I did early - I realised pretty early on that tacking on a pause mode / title screen / game over screen at the last minute would be pretty fiddly, so I got that in first. Pause is surprisingly hard to implement if you don't get it right, and it's easiest to get it right at the beginning. Also, switching between intro sequence / menu / game / game over / menu can be tricky, especially when you need to manage the lifetime of all your entities properly (which is probably a bit harder in C than it would be in Python).
I also wrote two scripts, one to do a resource build of all my assets (essentially zipping them up into a single resource file) which I ran as part of the code build process, and a release script that packaged up the game ready for upload to this page.
The code build process was so quick (less than ten seconds) that I quickly entered that zen place where you can just focus, where you lose track of time, and just achieve an amazing amount of stuff. Minimising the gap between having an idea and actually testing it in game is so important, and <10s is so much better than the >10m I had when working on the PS3.
I always have hobby projects like this on the back-burner, and gamejam was a massive motivation to get something done for once. The high-visibility of what everyone else was working on really helped here, and two weeks is just about the right length of time to focus on something without getting bored or sidetracked. Thanks heaps to Simon for getting this thing off the ground, and congratulations to everyone that took part; we loved watching your progress!
But especially I'd like to thank Lloyd and Pazu, who have done such a great job (although Lloyd still can't believe that Olga voted for Ladybug).
- Jason Hutchens.

Comments

549 days ago Reactor wrote:
LOL @ the Bitmap Brothers esque logo ;)
552 days ago lloydkranzky wrote:
thank to you for the alpha testing Mr. cam. has fixed it now!
553 days ago cam wrote:
Hey guys, your release is missing an sqlite3.dll
553 days ago retrogradeorbit wrote:
I love the graphics so far.
555 days ago Simon wrote:
Awesome, can't wait see this. Look very old-school!
555 days ago chrism wrote:
Title screen looks way cool!

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Post Mortem

540 days ago lloydkranzky wrote:

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