disruption.ca

I put roughly 22 hours of work into Eaters Of Coins. It is kind of primitive, but I am happy with it and what I accomplished over the weekend. I entered the contest entirely for the purposes of learning, and I learned a lot.

Thanks:

A big thanks to Richard for hosting the competition.
I’d also like to thank Dumple whose comment in the irc channel were the inspiration for the name of the game. (See my timelog for details.)

Tools:

1. Perl
2. SDL
3. libsdl-perl (I used the debian package, not the cpan one.)
4. vim
5. The GIMP

What went right:

Perl – Using Perl meant that I was way more productive than I would have been in a lower level language like C or C++.

Keep it simple – I went with a very simple, abstract concept because I knew that I wouldn’t have a lot of time for graphics. I know almost nothing about using the GIMP, and don’t have a lot of artistic skills.

Concept – I like the game play concept that I came up with. I think that randomness in the controls was a neat way to apply the theme. I had a lot more ideas for game types beyond simply collecting coins, but unfortunately didn’t have time to implement them.

What went wrong:

Perl SDL – Using perl had it’s down sides as well. I can’t get the CPAN SDL module to install on any machine that I try it on. The only way I have been able to work with this module is via binary packages. If I had been prepared for the contest, I would have set up a build environment for producing windows binaries. I have put up binaries now, but it would have been nice if they were in my final submission. Also, there wasn’t a lot in they way of tutorials or examples available for this package, making my task of learning as I wrote even more difficult.

Not practicing – Eaters of Coins was in many ways my first game. It was my first in depth use of SDL, and there was so much I had to learn. If I had sat down and done a few practice coding sessions before the comp. I would have been way more productive. Learning how to drive the GIMP beforehand would have been helpful as well.

Graphics, sound, levels – I wanted to deliver more on this front, but my inexperience meant that just developing my basic idea into something that could be considered a game took up far too much of my time.

Not enough playtesting – I should have experimented with different values for the collision distance to pick up the coins. Increasing this is a simple tweak that really makes a difference to the game play.