(This post is a few days late. Holidays are very sneaky things and suddenly there’s no time to write!)
The last day of Indie Goodbye, Day 4, was probably the busiest of them all. At this point I still didn’t have any menus or UI in place, and there was no way to restart the game if you died, so there was quite a bit left before the game was user-friendly enough to release.
Before I could get buttons onscreen, however, I had to first port my button-handling classes and a few other utility classes that I’ve come to rely on. Since Haxe is so similar to AS3 this was a pretty straightforward process, just extremely tedious.
While porting my buttons, I realized that my fonts weren’t working. I ended up wasting a few hours trying to debug that before finally giving up and using a spritesheet of numerical digits for the score display. All the other text, such as that on the buttons and the text on the title screen had to be baked into images since I didn’t have any more time to waste on debugging the font display issue.
At around 6 hours before the deadline, I uploaded the game for a few of my friends to test. The feedback I received was invaluable and I was able to patch a few playability issues that people were experiencing. During this phase I added double jump and particle effects, and balanced the game’s difficulty quite a bit. With about 2 hours left I finally started putting in audio and got the game over screen displaying your score. I also replaced the mushroom sprite with an EGA-colored Professor Spelunkington sprite which helped to tie everything together nicely.
I uploaded the game and managed to post a link on the Indie Goodbye site with about 2 minutes to spare. I’ve made the current Windows version of Jungle Falls available here on my site and I plan to expand upon the game as I find time. All in all it was a pretty fun jam. If only the world was ending more often…
About Andrew Sandifer
