Post Mortem 2 Kyle

Post Mortem II

I feel that this second game jam was significantly more productive since I had finished transferring over from BlueJ and the Objectdraw library.  The two major problems I ran into were making the polygon cutting to work in a glitch free manner and switching from the pixel units I was using into meter units.  Other than that, most of my time was spent moving forward and implementing the different spell types that I was able to showcase today.  Most of the development time I spent on this aspect of the game had to do with NullPointer issues and broken polygons that resulted from minor glitches in my spell code.  Another issue I ran into when coding the spells was simply thinking about how I would restructure my code.  My code is somewhat rigid, and new features I add typically break the order and rules I set down for structure and organization.  A good deal of my productivity during the second game jam is due to the fact that I never ran into a really major error like the Polygon cutting.

At this point, I have the basic framework for the game I want to make.  Most of the necessary spells are in, and while I still have two to three more spells in mind, the only really hard one I want to implement is to have some kind of control spell that queries all nearby shapes and allows you to throw me at a given location.  The query function for this spell could be hard, as I don't want the player to throw polygons that are lodged in places he can't even reach.

From a code point of view, I still need to do some clean up work.  One problem is with the long collision detection system.  What I need is an interface for collidable objects.  The contactListener will just call the collision method of any object that collides, allowing for much faster collision registering.

Some errors still lurk.  A somewhat rare error is the lost polygon exception.  Occasionally a polygon will be barely self intersecting, leading to a triangulation error.  I currently dump the polygon...
Another error is with self containment.  If an object is spawned in another object, it tends to slow the game down.  If it cuts the polygon that it is contained in, the game glitches and instead spawns another object with the explosion shape, leading to further slowdown.

Really excited about working on this project though.  I think I have a good framework to work off of for these coming months.  A future problem right now is with implementing the graphics side of the game.  I don't have a specific art style in mind, and the art effects for spells will be tricky to get right.