Woody - Wrap up

tsmaster on 2007/09/09 14:37 of Big Dice Games Presents Woody Tigerbaum's Twisted Marble Factory

Well, I got a lot done, but could have done more. I did some last minute testing on my Linux box, which wasn't able to keep up with the 60fps I was asking for, so I inserted some adaptive frame limiting to try to get it to play smoothly on a wider range of machines. Here's hoping I didn't shoot myself in the foot by adding that so late in development

I also added the pause menu on the last day, but I had a better feeling about that - although there are probably other bugs related to it. For example, if the window loses focus, the music ought to stop. That's one bug I know about.

The credits in the readme have at least one error, too. Had I been keeping my readme up to date, rather than dash it off between release candidate 1 and release candidate 2, it might have helped.

I had considered having my levels have an enforced progression - do all the tutorial levels, which would unlock Tess and Blake, and then when you finished all of them, that would unlock Woody. Didn't get around to it, and gave myself the excuse that it'd just get in the way of judging (thought about having a cheat code to disable the feature, but figured it wasn't worth it).

I did manage to get the colorblind contrast art to work. When you hit 'C', the ball art is replaced by this:

which, I'm led to believe, looks like this to someone with no color perception at all (which is the worst case):

The green ball is problematic again, but it's playable, I think.

I spent most of Friday night editing voiceovers. I think they add a lot to make the various characters more personal and alive. I also think it's within the spirit of the rules to tap my friends for this sort of asset, and still call myself a "solo" entry. If you disagree, and want to play the game without voices, you can turn the sounds off by hitting 'S'. That also strips out the non-verbal "plonk", "clonk", and "click" stuff, which I'm also pretty proud of. I thought about doing all the voices myself (which actually would have saved me a fair bit of work, as my friends gave me a lot more voice clips than I was expecting or hoping for, so the editing job was a lot more than I had scheduled for), but my ability to pull off a female voice would have been jarringly bad.

I only uploaded a "final" version of the source version. I have a PY2EXE version on my website HERE, which I didn't think to go through the MD5 process for. So you shouldn't use it for judging the game, but if you wanted to show it to a non-Python friend, you could.

Thanks to everybody who gave me suggestions on what to improve. I intend to continue polishing and improving the game after the challenge is over (and my machine cools down). I can take some easy steps to improve the filesize and performance. There are several game design suggestions that I was given along the way that I want to try out - I suspect that many of them would have drastic repercussions if I did incorporate them.