I had been working on my tool-chain and engine for some time, albeit only in an on-and-off manner. This gave me a lot of confidence at the outset, which is why I budgeted so much of my time to the Mode7 work.
Outside of the UI library and the asset decompression, pretty much everything else had lots of bugs in it as my test roms simply weren't robust enough and when I tried to push systems (or use them together) lots of issues became apparent.
The ones that stick out;
- My VRAM allocator for sprites would occasionally re-use slots due to an aliased ZP variable I had accidentally introduced, corrupting VFX seemingly at random
- I crammed too much code into Bank 0 early on being lazy, and had to stop and de-tangling things and group/split logic between 0 and 1, to avoid long-jumping all over the place
- My player state handling was too rigid, and made it difficult to introduce the platform mechanics I wanted, so I had to stop and re-write it to make the movement feel good (though I heard loud and clear that input mapping was still not what people expected!)
- My toolchain for palette quantization/optimization has some bugs when animating palettes, which would cause palettes to not coalesce correctly, resulting in bad (or missing) colours. I ended up swapping some animations to be blitting instead
- My engine incorrectly set some VBLANK only registers ouside of VBLANK, which worked fine in emulators and hardware on my test-roms, but caused issues once enough real logic was occurring each frame. So I had to refactor and buffer them correctly
You get the idea! For every feature I added to the very short game, I spent far more time just bug-fixing systems I thought were ready for use already. Add into that a fulltime job, Wife and Kids, and all the other things real-life throws at you I just simply did not have the time I thought I would have for forward progress.
Pretty much all my time for level design, music, etc... which got crunched down into the last 5 days of the jam to polish what I had. Which is why the music has short loops, menu SFX are missing, the levels are short, some jumps are not possible, and tutorial text/NPCs were dropped.
Lesson learned, humble pie very much eaten :D And at least I have all these fixes integrated back into the engine/tools for any future projects now!