So, I completed my first game for the #onegameamonth.com challenge.
I’ll write a full “post-mortem” later on, but for now I will just note some impressions.
(Edit: I think this will suffice as a full “post-mortem” after all)

Development of the game started Wednesday, so about 4 days after I chose to join onegameamonth.
The idea that I used for my game was actually the first one I came up with. When I try to come up with ideas I think of small, realistic ones. I don’t want to start a behemoth of a project I know I cannot complete in the next few months (or more realistically: never). I want to see results and I want to be able to have fun with games as fast as possible.
So I look for small, dense, but complete gameideas, so it’s all about gameplay and an an arcade feeling (Maybe I will release older games later on, but they are very unpolished).

After Christmas I started fooling around with Slick2D, I “stole” a Link sprite and gave him animation/movement. I already had onegameamonth bookmarked, but I wasn’t too sure if I could handle it. I’m not (yet) too good with graphics and frankly do not want to use too much time for them. But stealing sprites from other games was also not possible, so my enthusiasm was not the greatest.

Suddenly, in the last days of 2012 I came across a post on reddit, which referenced a site called opengameart.org. I was psyched! There it was, a resource I could get graphics from and legally(!!!) use them in my games!? Awesome!

So I started development on Wednesday evening. I didn’t accomplish too much, it took way more time than I’d imagined to just get the sprites in the game. So I stopped until the next day. My motivation wasn’t the greatest on Thursday either and I had stuff to do anyway, so I didn’t really do anything.

The next day, Friday, I started coding and …I… was…. hooked! Programming was smooth, I started out slow, but I got “better and better”, just a few bugs, but I could get rid of them in less than 30 mins each. (A whole day concentrating 100% on working on a game, how awesome is that?) And by the time evening came, I wanted to stop, I realised that I managed to do more than I had hoped to, but I couldn’t just quit. So I continued, and suddenly it became very clear: I’m almost finished?! I was perplexed, because, although everything, every small feature seemed to take forever to implement I was almost done. It was similar to my programming learning experience, I just thought “maaaan, when will I be able to code” so often, I overlooked the fact that I could already code.
So in the evening I chose to use the tileset, featured for january #1GAM and I was surprised how easy it was to put it into the game!

The next day, I polished the game a little, implemented a score and health system, but nothing huge. I saw that the code got messier and messier the previous day, but I did (and still do) not care. Sure everyone can look at it and critisize, but hey: The game works! It’s my first complete Java/Slick2D game so I do not care what others may say about the code, but I sure know that I learned a lot for future games. And that is what I want to do: learn as much as possible. Atleast for this month, I succeeded in this epic quest.
All that’s left to say: Thank You @McFunkyPants for #onegameamonth!