The project
The Fancy Pants Adventures World One Demo (which also happens to have the longest name I've ever given a project) was my entry for Omnimaga's 2011 Axe Platformer Contest. I had it planned as the most awesome calculator project any of the judges/voters ever laid theirs eyes on, but as with every other major project in life, I procrastinated it horribly. On the very last day of the contest, July 15th, I was still rushing to fix some pretty obvious bugs—bugs that I ultimately managed to get around (somewhat) but not completely remove.
The final product was a huge disappointment for me when I compared it to what I had planned to make. It wasn't even close to a port of the original game: it didn't have spiders, achievements, or "coins," or even health and lives; there were no fancy backgrounds, backdrops, or any other graphics except for basic lines; and (worst of all, in my opinion) Fancy Pants couldn't rotate in midair, so he couldn't do backflips. (I almost had the last one implemented, but then I got lazy.) Hardly the tribute I wanted it to be.
So what did it have? It was by far the most complex platformer engine I'd ever attempted, mostly because most of the physics was over my head. I'd groped around for months trying to make something that looked realistic (granted, I only worked for the last week or so), and I kinda liked the result, bugs and all. I also made a complete animated sprite designer with sixteen angles of rotation, then used that to make 40 or so different sprites for the game. There was also a rudimentary level designer that only I knew how to use.
Simply put, it was a failure.
