Some positive stuff:

I had a lot of fun working on my game and I'm quite happy with what I ended up submitting.

The bits of polish like the main menu, points gained indicators, and level transitions are things I haven't tried to add before. Each is just a small feature but together they really enhance the over all experience.

There was only a little bit of fighting with my code base / engine. For once it seemed like I had everything I needed and it was all pretty reasonably organized. However, this is mostly because I completely avoided dealing with the issues I know my engine has with collision. Specifically, that my actors are currently limited in their size which was part of the reason I didn't have any alligators or logs appearing in my game.

Somehow I was able to track down the website I stumbled upon before for free music as well as the artist that I had in mind. I came across freemusicarchive.org back when working on WOA V but forgot to write down the name of the site. I'm sure I had bookmarked the site at one point but cleaned up old bookmarks since then.

One of the biggest boosts to my motivation was when my kids asked if they could play the game. Early on, I was showing off to them what I was working on and then about a week later they remembered and excitedly asked to play. Unfortunately, the build was in a terrible state right then so I told them they'd have to wait. As much as I wanted to get my submission in, the chance to impress the kids is just awesome. I have to let them know, it's ready to play.

I was generally happy with my programmer art. The turtle just came together looking really well.

Though time was an issue, I will say it was nice not feeling like I had to pull continuous all-nighters to get anywhere with this thing.

Stuff that didn't go quite as well / considerations for next time:

Like everyone else, time. I had figured on having more time to work on the game but life just throws things your way sometimes like priorities at the office, a broken sink, or just helping battle the colds that kids seem to bring home from school.

I could easily have spent another 2 weeks or more sorting out issues that I knew about and making levels. I wanted to have a fourth level that was an import of an island height map I did some time ago for an RPG project. It was going to be 128*128 tiles while the levels I did include were 24*24 or 32*32. One reason it didn't make it in was that I found that, when the level began, the scrolling had some issues going from its current position to centering onto the player. There just wasn't time to figure out how to deal with that.

Found a bug at the start of the last week where if one actor is carrying another there's a potential for a crash (invalid pointer) when one of the actors is destroyed. I thought I managed a quick work around for that before submission but I think this is the issue that Znippy mentioned, and I have to imagine that others have experienced. I will be needing to track this down as it'll be something that manifests in other projects that use those bits of code.

As I mentioned earlier, when I started this project I had visions of taking a look at the actor size restriction I'm currently dealing with. Didn't look at that at all so ended up with fewer actors to add to levels.

Though I'm happy with my programmer art and had fun making it, it's still programmer art. Couldn't hurt to find an artist to work with one day.

I'm not as happy with the splash animation as my other graphics. It's just too small. It kinda works when the animation isn't obscured by other actors but I'd rather the splash did more of the obscuring.

The size of the frog vs size of the turtles makes it tough to see when turtles are going to submerge.

The cars move too fast in some places. This is just a bit of a tweaking / balancing issue more than anything. Actually, I think it's fair to say that in most of the entries this was also the case.

I probably should be interacting with everybody more.

What's next for me?

First, I'm going to track down the crash when the turtles submerge with the frog. The code involved is used in other projects so it'd be good to understand what's going on there.

It'll also be cool to see what my kids think of the game and maybe let them take a crack at putting together their own levels. I wouldn't mind finishing up that 128*128 tile level myself, though I suspect the size would actually end up making the level less interesting than I'd hope for.

I would very much like to work on a few more of these Challenges but the plan for the next while is to get back to project One Day. I'll have a few improvements from the Frogger Challenge to bring over to that and then, I think it becomes mostly about setting levels with sufficient props and writing dialogue for characters. Basically, it's a project I'm working on for my wife and kids so I was hoping to be done for end of January but at this point I suspect I would be lucky to even meet my next target of April.

One last link to the project page: