I wrote this up as the LD writeup, but I'll put it here too, with some addendum:

Today(Sunday) was a slog. VERY difficult to work today, ran into a number of things that did not work as planned. However, as seen from below, something did happen today – and despite it looking very … odd (because that’s not the game, nor a background: that’s the landscape or level from a top-down view. All 16 of them, randomly shown. I could do 64, they pack in an area of memory, and I can unpack them.

Here’s what’s going to happen from here: I’m going to take this and work on it more this week, turning it into a game. I’m not going to worry about fitting the theme, because it’s not going to do that – this is going to be a RPG/JRPG/Roguelike thing. I may try to do RL7D, I may just say “I don’t care if it fits in something.”

< the picture went here >

POSTMORTEM:

What went well

• I got code done yesterday (Saturday) and didn’t have that many difficulties; that was due to pomodoro.

• I had fun with the little guy generation and stopped fiddling with it and moved on, knowing I could come back later – and I could improve them in various ways, but they were good enough and I could make lots of them – and had some ideas for more things I could fiddle with. (Mind you, it may need to be 2 or 3 numbers per character, because of the numeric limit I discovered today.)

-The status bar looks good, not too shiny, not too “coder gfx”

What did NOT

• The pico8 utilities from the ‘awesome pico-8’ thing: they .. didn’t work with pico-8 and swanky paint. I filed swankypaint bugs, but quite frankly, I think I can write the utils better. (And I already did the “join” thing using zsh.)

• I didn’t have enough experience with Pico-8 internals to realize when I should be using the Pico-8 builtin, and not ‘make-my-own’ lua bit – or depending on an external lib. Some more experience with lua is also needed. (Strings are immutable – oh yeah I knew that but did it sink in? No, I thought “Oh if the integers are too small I’ll stuff the data in a string.” No, no you won’t.)

• And that is just silly because I should have. I've been meaning to spend more time with lua and Pico-8 and have been bouncing around, which I was defending as "oh you should do a new thing every week so you learn more" - that is not working, I am just bouncing around.

• I didn’t get any music or sound in – and before the next thing, I’m going to need to do something with that. Because a full game needs that (:

What didn’t have any bearing on things

• I never had a really good feel for the theme. I made some stuff for a game but the theme didn’t enter into it, it didn’t give me any inspiration, it was just there. I didn’t worry about it, other than during reviews of things when I would say “I have no idea how I’m working the theme into this.”

• (the theme was 'one room' and it was a bit more "open ended" than I needed to get a good feel for something. A few LD's ago there was one that I loathed which was something like "enemy" or just ... so open ended that I was able to make anything fit it. I said this on the irc channel and someone said "you totally can't, you couldn't make a racing game" so I described how one could make a racing game with it, and then a 2nd one, and then someone said "shit can I use that?" and I said yes. And then someone else said "Dentistry" and I took that, added the car racing (racing to get to your patients before the enemy took their teeth) and then the channel said "ok yeah um wow you aren't having any issues at all with ideas, what's the problem" and I explained that with so MANY ideas, I couldn't narrow it down to just ONE to start working. And we all agreed that was fucked up.)

• The ideas I did have – they might have worked into something, but they weren’t really go-do-it ideas.

What I would like to work on next with this

• Text stuff. I need to see how I can generate text, possibly from a 2nd cart, and use it in the game. There’s the possibility for colored text for emphasis, I haven’t done that yet.
• I spent too long yesterday on the text justification and realized today that it would have been better to make a SINGLE routine for that, not two; and use a function for the output - a display function (save to screen) and a save function (save to memory.) That would have reduced the bug hunting.

• It was good though, I got further - as there is no debugger - so I had to just go and trace, and fiddle with prints, and so on. I got through it, and it was good practice. But it took too long.

• I have to determine if I’m going to do a pseudo-3d-view for it, or if I’m going to do a top-down view. Top-down is easier, but I think the 3d bit may work out nicer.

• pseudo-3d would also be harder math and I probably should avoid that since I absolutely SUCK at math.

• The level bits make good ‘forest’ areas, but I should try a ‘town’ generation and a ‘building’ generation and a ‘dungeon’ generation.

• Adventure gameplay.

So yeah, this one – I’ll work on it more in the next few days – then work on Amiga stuff (:

• Ok apparently we can't use gif files... or something is whacked with the images again. Well you can see the post on LD here: http://ludumdare.com/compo/2016/12/11/the-wrapup-for-now/

Last Edited on Sun Dec 11 2016 18:47:56 GMT-0500 (EST)