Day X: Delivering the Entry

Wow! We're already at the end of this game jam. It's been great.

I'm going to reserve this post in specific to the technical stuff and describing what I did to finish, and then build, this game. I'll leave the talk about my experience to a last devlog which I'll make today or tomorrow; and I'll also have a translation of it to Portuguese on my personal blog.

So, last post, I ended up cutting some more stuff just to make the game simpler -- and deliverable. Right now I got 14 hours to go, and here's what I got so far:

• The level end trigger. This compares for the level size. Unfortunately the game is still playable under the Game Over screen, but since there are no enemies nor score count, I think it's okay. You just press START and restart. This is easily fixable, but I prefer to leave it as some kind of "bonus" for completing the game.
• The method to build the game for both Linux and Windows. Linux building is more reliable, and I also described how to actually run the script directly on your box with SBCL, provided that you got Quicklisp, SDL2 and SDL2_Image laying around. The Windows build requires a particular setup of Wine on my Linux, which I can't easily share, but the build has proven reliable among friends. The game uses the same build method as cl-snake, which is basically dumping the SBCL core into a binary executable.
• This wasn't listed before, but I managed to randomize the ship's machinegun a little bit, because it was a little hard to shoot in a simple straight line.
• I felt a little necessary to give visual feedback when the ship hits an enemy, so I did it. The player's ship assume a slightly transparent, red-ish fill color when hit by an enemy, for a period of time (exactly three times the time an enemy flashes when hit).
• I added a little explanatory text including the game's controls, on the main menu. Of course, I'll also add them to the game's page.
• I finally made the first level... well, sort of. It is very small, but it gives a good taste of the game. I had to outsource the level's creation tools and data to its own file, though -- it's already hard enough to scroll through the sketch's source code.

Right now, my concerns are just small things: I need to build and package the game for Windows and Linux; I need to add more game info (specially regarding controls) to the itch page; and then I need to actually submit those binaries using Butler. Oh, and of course, submit the entry to the game jam!

These next steps will be done in a few hours. I might even still tweak stuff a bit here and there, though.

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EDIT: Just submitted the game to itch.io and the entry to Lisp Game Jam 2018. Check back on the main page for download links, and remember to report bugs or problems running the game. Thank you for playing!