#Good

• Understood the API before the Jam

• Leveraged libraries

• SPARTAN is awesome for fast abstract sprites

• GIMP is still useful

• Having lots of tunes to pick from helps

• Inheritance saved me a lot of time

• Made a fancy script playback system

• Lots of neat visuals with mostly code

• Primitives and text in place of sprites was fast

• Super simple collision only

#Bad

• Some inheritance was not useful

• Fancy script playback was fancier than it needed to be

• I stil don’t know how to make simple scaling functions for difficulty

• Player sprite is pretty underwhelming

• Forgot to change the font color on the high score screen :(

• Got seriously tripped up on positioning text for too long

• Enemy trails might look better with a borderless sprite like the player

• Spent too much time working with color names not knowing what they looked like

#Lessons Learned

• GM:S Macros are not static and that is AWESOME

• In GM:S it is better to have one big string with line breaks and to draw using draw_text_ext() than to try spacing text out

• Don’t be afraid to use text and primitives in place of simple sprites for things like powerups

• When do lots of color work in code have the pallete with names on the screen at all times

• Figure out which colors are foreground and background before making any background images

• If a small isolated piece of code like positioning the HUD text is not behaving as expected, just start over