A few months ago I got an email notifying me about the Intel’s Level Up game competition. At first I just looked into it a little and didn’t make plans to enter. About a week ago when I once again stumbled upon this competition I decided to go for it. So I started testing my game. During Indie game fest in Tartu I discovered some interesting bugs. I had forgotten to fully implement the highscore and savegame system. Savegames were deleted when exiting the game and scores were cleared at game start. After fixing these issue I was face with another challenge.

Since the game competition required a downloadable demo to enter I needed to come up with one. I’m not sure how other developers handle the situation where you want to create a demo version of the full game. At first I tried creating demo in a separate branch and merge some commits to the demo branch. This became very complicated very fast. So I decided to create a demofy script. The script removes certain lines from the codes. The lines are marked with special tags. Also the demofy script removes all unused image and sound files.

Having got this demos stuff covered I had to look into creating an executable for windows. This is where launch4j comes to help. Launch4j is quite straight forward. I created the configuration file in the GUI and afterwards used this created xml file from command line.

When all these things were covered I did some final test games and off to the Intel’s Level Up 2014 contest.