I did a 30 hour marathon. I wrote >33000 characters. Almost 4000 words and 1200 lines. And it was a struggle. All the way till the end. Everything was some new problem I had to figure out. The hours just kept flying by. But I kept punching along. Eventually I finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel. The deadline was 4 hours away and I was on a breakaway. The structure was built and stable, I just had to copy and paste a few blocks of code to run the new levels. I used some pretty weird techniques that I would have never considered before.
For example I can't draw people. They always come out lumpy. I had a halfway decent looking one, but the perspective was all wrong so I used a stick figure placeholder. Then I figured it out, I put some thumbtacks into my ceiling with a rubberband between them. Then switched my phones camera to 3120x3120 then set the voice activation and strapped it to my ceiling camera down. Then I put the photos in GIMP and did some color work to try and get rid of that "Realistic person in a video game mortal kombat" look. It didn't help. At least until I shrunk the photo down to 50x50, then it look'd AWESOME! Straight up all the art in my game's has always been just horrible. But that one sprite, he's beautiful. I'm keeping him. He's going in other stuff.
Another thing I'd never considered doing before was only using a single room for a game with multiple levels and midlevels. No idea why I decided to try it this time. I guess I reasoned it would be easier then having to deal with persistence. But it's not like it's ever given me a problem before. Also learned the value of local variables. Turns out adding "global." in front of everything is a pretty cool way to have random things randomly break. Also I usually use a god object. A single controller with no sprite. I've heard it's bad practice though so I tried to split things up. That didn't work out super well in the end. When something went wrong I was digging though 4 or 5 different blocks trying to figure out how their objects interacted so horribly that it broke 2/3 of the game.
I learned how amazingly awesome and powerful the built in random functions are. It was probably the most enticing aspect of the game "Oh, is this pig going to be worth $50 or $500? Who knows!
I got to actually USE some of the comments I wrote in the code, usually I'll just comment what a confusing looking thing does or use them like a bookmark system so I can just scan the green to find what i'm looking for. But since I didn't cram everything into one object I needed them to point me to the direction of what things in one object were tied to things in another object. It's as confusing as it sounds.
This was my first two day Jam, I've done a 7 day jam before and I LOVED IT. There was some pressure to get finished but also enough time to make sure things were done the best I could. I was NOT prepared for a 2 day. 48 hours sounds like a MASSIVE amount of time if you just go simple. I went as simple as I could. Like back to the basics simple. Like basically recreated my first tutorial game simple. I figured core gameplay would be done in a few hours and I could just lay back and work on art and music. The art's decent for my ability, I try not to stick with placeholders on things for too long because then they might just get stuck there and i'll have to apologize to anyone who looks at it. But I was SO far off from adding ANY kind of sound. How hard can a 2d side scroller be? I guess as hard as you make it.
By the final hour my game was a broken, spaghetti, unfinished, buggy, unsightly pile of crap. I'll probably need to rewrite half of the code just to get it working again but I know where I went wrong. So if you're still reading, learn from my mistake. Don't use flags you have working in one area, to do something completely different. Just make another flag. I had a flag I used to once loop the steps for all of my level prep. It was elegant, I always knew where I was because the flag would keep things in line. Then because it was a global I used it for some other once loops. so when it came time for some quick copy paste work to fill out the the skeleton of the new levels before I added in their little quirks, everything went south and levels were being half loaded or skipped entirely with no idea how to fix it because the flag was all over the place.
But again, thank you for hosting. I've had an incredibly insightful weekend and am feeling very fulfilled. The last second disaster was like some kind of movie moment and I really felt like a plucky hero just trying to pull everything together to survive.
Anyone else have an experience they want to share?