LMS Contest Round 1 post mortem

Hey there, I thought I do a little post mortem of my round one entry.

The following is basically my interpretation of the round broken down into features and was used as a check list as I went through. This seemed to work pretty well for me to keep my focus as my time was pretty limited. Anything that was completed has a + next to it. Anything I deemed as extra to the brief generally has (extra) near by.

Pre-requsites and Prep

+ use Ninja Image Map
+ set up animations
+ create a platform for their character
+ apply gravitic physics (pointless just add down force to behaviour)

Round 1 - Movement Based Behavior(s)

Phase I

	Input support for 
	+ keyboard
	+ joystick
	- mouse input ( reluctant to and this as its kinda pointless IMHO - if time permits will do - mouse platformer controls yuck!)

	Modifiers
	+ jumpSpeed
	+ horizontalForce

	extensions added
	----------------
	+ gravity mod in editor
	+ fake horizontal damping
	- adjust damping in editor

	Animations
	- left (fairly pointless..I'm using a flip)
	+ right
	+ jump
	+ fall

	extensions added
	----------------
	+ idle

Phase II

	Double jump support
	+ check box for on/off double jump
	+ only allow double jump near jump peak

	extensions added
	----------------
	+ player limited to one double jump per main jump
	+ player has editor option to allow double jump off springs
	

Phase III
	Double Dash
	+ dash on 2 quick pushes of a horizontal movement button

	extensions added
	----------------
	+ ability to adjust dash velocity in editor
	+ ability to adjust tap timing in editor
	+ visualisation (optional)
	+ added behaviour based ghosting - (no stop on frame for t2dAnimatedSprite! arg!)

Phase IV
	Camera Mount
	+ mount the camera to the player (seems real pointless as its already done and in TDN)
	- maybe some improvements but the cam TGB cam glitch is going to be an issue.

	+ so, I decided to tweak it. Used the TDN behaviour mount camera behaviour. Works fine.
	extensions added
	----------------
	+ (extra) - added view locking

The general round coding went pretty smoothly for me and I learnt a whole bunch of stuff about TGB. A few of the engine features made me scream and a few made me say hey that's cool. But generally I think it was worth while. The experience highlighted a few of the engines bugs including the publish setting being a bit over zealous and making unnecessary files.

One of the thing that made me say "that's cool" to my self is -

sceneWindow2D.setViewLimitOn(%this.minX, %this.minY, %this.maxX, %this.maxY);

That really saves a lot of boring position checking code and camera movement code and solves the problem of stopping the camera panning off screen in one line.

I spent a lot of time on trying to extend the movement to work with slopes / walls etc but this did not end up in the my final submission as it was buggy as hell and I didn't really have a lot of time for this round. Although this didn't work I learnt a lot about the pickLine and castCollision functions that I didn't know.

So, my final version essentially supports flat platforms and is likely to be very wiggy when used with slopes etc etc hopefully someone else had the time to try that out and get it working.

I did add a few quick extras in as I was getting bored running and jumping around on one platform. These were fake spring and a really simple teleport portal which is not great but is better than nothing.

Anyway, I know you guys like images so here are a couple :



Also, if anyone wants to try it there is a binary version of my entry here saikosystems.co.uk/TGB/Saiko-Round-1-2008-Entry.rar


Overall, I feel the first round was pretty good. I think Glenn needs a slap for starting it midweek but I suppose that's all part of the fun. As it is the first one I think the organisers will have learnt something as well as the entrants. So, generally its been pretty cool. I would have like more time but then programmers would always like more time... ;)