Time for a quick postmortem of my entry, “An Old Man And His Quest”:
What Went Right
- Initial concept: although I’m not a big fan of this theme, my wife helped me with a basic idea so I could jump right into working on the game
- Getting scripting working: this really helped me get the game working as I intended, and really made it easy to add powers and cutscenes to the game… I’m probably going to merge that component I did in the compo onto the framework for the next time.
- Graphics: by going 3d and using some pixel art skills I picked up on the latest compos, I could do something that didn’t look completely terrible.
- Music: Again, WolframTones served me well for 48 hour game music…
- Cutscenes: I love doing cutscenes, specially in this kind of limited environment… Having to think on ways to twist my meager artistic skills and limited tech is very entertaining for me
- Mixing the “game” stuff and the “menu” stuff in a single framework… All becomes more interesting, and it’s less work to make behave properly, especially with the scripting engine
What went wrong
- Time managment: Again, I failed miserably in estimating development time, most of it by not considering the rest of the things that went wrong
- Going 3d: I almost always think about going 3d and don’t do it because it’s normally harder (even 2.5D like in this game)… This ended up being no exception, and I had loads of problems getting the initial setup working correctly… It also led to some driver-related problems and things like that, that made me loose loads of time… :\ The end result is a mixed blessing: it looks better, but it took longer…
- Bugs: Ran into some bugs after the deadline, which meant the game seems more buggy to everyone than it seems to me… :\ Fixed most post-compo, but that’s too late…
- No time for level design: In all compos, I promise myself I’ll code something simple and let 4 or 5 hours at the end for pure level design, game balancing, tuning and polish… and I always fail at this… This time was no exception… I had 5 levels thought of, only had time to make 4 (and the last one was terribly unbalanced)
- Using Photoshop as level design tool: what seemed like a nice idea ended up being more complicated than it should, which kind of defeated the purpose… next time I think I’ll be back to ASCII text files… or a good tile editor, if I can find one that suits my needs (haven’t found any so far, all demand too much work getting to work properly or require me to write a weird importer)
The game has circa 3000 lines of C++ code and 1100 lines of Lua code, and the framework about 17000.
Tools used:
Code: Visual Studio 2005
APIs: DirectX 9 (Feb), FMod, Win32, Lua
Graphics: Photoshop CS4
Sound: WolframTones (very awesome, only had 20 mins or so to play with it), Midi Converter Free (online free midi to mp3 converter), Sfxr
Blogging: Internet Explorer
Listening music: Winamp
On an end note, I’ll probably grab the 3d tiling stuff and scripting binds and merge it with the rest of my LD framework, for future use… I still want a competition where I can actually spend time working on the game, instead of the technology!
Thanks everybody that participated for an exciting weekend!