This is an archive, stream of consciousness style, devblog of my adventures trying to code up a game for the first time.

Here is what I did for the first few days:

Trying to use graphics2d and realizing that I needed hardware acceleration. Tried unity, but it was too heavy for what I needed and I felt I could write it out faster from scratch. Transitioned to opengl with jlwgl, where I was able to rapidly get back to where I was with graphics2d in under a day, while also implemented keyboard controls. This let me switch layers and control the player. I spent two days trying to get collision detection done, before realizing it might be better to shrink my player size down. I started using Paint.NET to map out the different levels/layers, but found I needed a convenient way to store the visual part of the level, as well as the level code itself. I then turned to excel and used its conditional formatting utility to let me map out my levels quickly. I wrote a quick python script to take the excel data and turn it into the level code. This let me design my levels extremely quickly, and let me play them immediately, without having to resort to storing the level data on disk.