Hello everybody!

While I'm sure we're all enjoying the sheer silence that comes after a good session of jamming together a half baked game in a way too small amount of time, why don't we share what went well, and not so well, during our development?

My worst moment

Spend a full hour debugging the AI that was hopelessly running against the wall and literally fleeing from the battleground as if it was scared by the enemy.
It took me an hour to discover that the issue was an inverted argument in a condition: (> 0 pos) instead of (> pos 0).

My best moment

Make the AI play by itself for the first time. I was sooo happy to see it move by itself, even if it was just the routine "Select a unit > Move forward > Validate". For the first time my game was "alive". I was literally dancing in front of my screen.

So, what about you?

My worst moment

I stated the jam two days late, built a prototype in a day, then spent a day learning how to use other parts of the Racket language to do it better, so I threw everything out and started again on ~ Day 5! Realizing that I wouldn’t really have a game but more of a world explorer on the last few days was a bit upsetting

My best moment  

Being able to use a third party simplex noise library and generate elevation maps and visualize them in 3D is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in computer science. Being able to then translate that to a 2D, top-down ASCII view was really rewarding and gives me lots of ideas on how to work with that in the future!

Best Moment: Probably when I saw my Emitter class iterating through the firing sequence actions provided to via the first level. This sequence of delayed but defined functions called at certain keyframes was successful I feel. It's less clean in some other languages. Especially if you don't have parameter lists with optional parameters.

Worst Moment: Trying to figure out how to deploy to multiple systems and realizing that I've probably been using GitHub wrong all this time. Feeling a bit guilty for spending some of borodust's development time in helping me deploy.

Worst moment: Running out of time with half of my gameplay ideas still unimplemented.  I knew I wouldn't have time to do everything, but I got even less done than I'd expected.  Next jam, I will make better use of my time.  Also: Trying to make an OS X build with 50 minutes left and realizing I had no idea what I was doing.

Best moment: I showed my husband the prototype and he danced to the music.  So I know at least one person enjoyed it!  Best coding moment was the first time getting the parallax background working.  It's always nice when something clicks and goes from "total disaster" to "fully functional, surprise!"