Twisted post mortem

Hectigo on 2007/09/10 14:19 of Hectic Game Development 2

Everything is over. Still waiting for the torrent, but I guess it's the right time to analyze my doings a little. My approach to coding was quite different from last time, and didn't work quite as well, but at least I learned a few valuable lessons.

Stuff that I did right this time:

• Didn't give up, even when it seemed quite hopeless to finish the game as I had planned. In the end, I have some sort of a game, even if I it doesn't have all the features I would've liked it to have.
• Increased my supply of generic utility functions to ease coding.

Stuff that I didn't do right:

• Bit a little more than I could chew. If I had really been able to use the whole week, the game might've been more complete. But I started a bit late and finished early, and my early plans were way too ambitious for a one week, one man project.
• Didn't test the game nearly enough. Even the final version has some trivial bugs that crash the game or make it behave in a way it shouldn't. And I'm still not sure if the game is balanced or not.
• Didn't plan my architecture well enough. Ok, I was new to network programming anyway, and didn't quite know what it would take. Anyway, I'll have plenty of restructuring work ahead of me.

And finally, the fix to make the game not crash when trying to join a game. On line 77 in main.py, replace

          if (input_addr != None):

with

          if (address != None):

and the game should connect instead of crashing. I also found one other bug - having an unit in the first buy slot in a base can block buying at the second slot, and buying at the second slot might result in errors. Both bugs are fixed in a new version I'm working on now, and I'll publish a new version of the game and also an updated version of Splush after PyWeek voting has finished.

Finally, one site suggestion for richard: Add an author tag to the Diaries RSS entries. Should really help in organizing them.