{"id":446,"date":"2011-05-06T12:22:01","date_gmt":"2011-05-06T11:22:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shadowcovenant.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/06\/an-old-man-and-his-quest-postmortem\/"},"modified":"2011-05-06T12:22:01","modified_gmt":"2011-05-06T11:22:01","slug":"an-old-man-and-his-quest-postmortem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/shadowcovenant.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/06\/an-old-man-and-his-quest-postmortem\/","title":{"rendered":"An Old Man And His Quest &#8211; Postmortem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Time for a quick postmortem of my entry, \u201cAn Old Man And His Quest\u201d:<\/p>\n<p><strong>What Went Right<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Initial concept: although I\u2019m 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<\/li>\n<li>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\u2026 I\u2019m probably going to merge that component I did in the compo onto the framework for the next time.<\/li>\n<li>Graphics: by going 3d and using some pixel art skills I picked up on the latest compos, I could do something that didn\u2019t look completely terrible.<\/li>\n<li>Music: Again, WolframTones served me well for 48 hour game music\u2026<\/li>\n<li>Cutscenes: I love doing cutscenes, specially in this kind of limited environment\u2026 Having to think on ways to twist my meager artistic skills and limited tech is very entertaining for me<\/li>\n<li>Mixing the \u201cgame\u201d stuff and the \u201cmenu\u201d stuff in a single framework\u2026 All becomes more interesting, and it\u2019s less work to make behave properly, especially with the scripting engine<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>What went wrong<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Time managment: Again, I failed miserably in estimating development time, most of it by not considering the rest of the things that went wrong<\/li>\n<li>Going 3d: I almost always think about going 3d and don\u2019t do it because it\u2019s normally harder (even 2.5D like in this game)\u2026 This ended up being no exception, and I had loads of problems getting the initial setup working correctly\u2026 It also led to some driver-related problems and things like that, that made me loose loads of time\u2026 :\\ The end result is a mixed blessing: it looks better, but it took longer\u2026<\/li>\n<li>Bugs: Ran into some bugs after the deadline, which meant the game seems more buggy to everyone than it seems to me\u2026 :\\ Fixed most post-compo, but that\u2019s too late\u2026<\/li>\n<li>No time for level design: In all compos, I promise myself I\u2019ll code something simple and let 4 or 5 hours at the end for pure level design, game balancing, tuning and polish\u2026 and I always fail at this\u2026 This time was no exception\u2026 I had 5 levels thought of, only had time to make 4 (and the last one was terribly unbalanced)<\/li>\n<li>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\u2026 next time I think I\u2019ll be back to ASCII text files\u2026 or a good tile editor, if I can find one that suits my needs (haven\u2019t found any so far, all demand too much work getting to work properly or require me to write a weird importer)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The game has circa 3000 lines of C++ code and 1100 lines of Lua code, and the framework about 17000.<\/p>\n<p>Tools used:<\/p>\n<p>Code: Visual Studio 2005<br \/>\nAPIs: DirectX 9 (Feb), FMod, Win32, Lua<br \/>\nGraphics: Photoshop CS4<br \/>\nSound: <a href=\"http:\/\/tones.wolfram.com\/\">WolframTones<\/a> (very awesome, only had 20 mins or so to play with it), <a href=\"http:\/\/free-midi-converter.com\/\">Midi Converter Free<\/a> (online free midi to mp3 converter), Sfxr<br \/>\nBlogging: Internet Explorer<br \/>\nListening music: Winamp<\/p>\n<p>On an end note, I\u2019ll probably grab the 3d tiling stuff and scripting binds and merge it with the rest of my LD framework, for future use\u2026 I still want a competition where I can actually spend time working on the game, instead of the technology!<\/p>\n<p>Thanks everybody that participated for an exciting weekend!<\/p>\n<div id=\"tweetbutton446\" class=\"tw_button\" style=\"\"><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fshadowcovenant.com%2Fblog%2F2011%2F05%2F06%2Fan-old-man-and-his-quest-postmortem%2F&amp;text=An%20Old%20Man%20And%20His%20Quest%20%26%238211%3B%20Postmortem&amp;related=&amp;lang=en&amp;count=horizontal&amp;counturl=http%3A%2F%2Fshadowcovenant.com%2Fblog%2F2011%2F05%2F06%2Fan-old-man-and-his-quest-postmortem%2F\" class=\"twitter-share-button\"  style=\"width:55px;height:22px;background:transparent url('http:\/\/shadowcovenant.com\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-tweet-button\/tweetn.png') no-repeat  0 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