555-BOOM! Response to Feedback

gcewing on 2007/09/24 05:23 of 555-BOOM!

This has been the most successful of my PyWeek entries so far, by a large margin. I'm personally quite pleased by the way it turned out. Somehow I managed to hit on something that I was able to implement fairly completely and still have some time left for polishing and level design.

From the feedback, it seems that most people who were able to play the game properly liked it. However, the random level ordering bug appears to have ruined it for many people. Sorry about that! I was undone by an unexpected "feature" of Linux -- the glob function there apparently doesn't return its results sorted. I posted a fix, but maybe I didn't advertise it clearly enough.

Counting terminals: I hadn't intended that part to be so tedious. I'm thinking about numbering the terminals on the selectors in a future version, which may help to alleviate that.

Repetitiveness: I was trying to introduce some variety into the later levels, but I didn't have much time for level design. The same goes for gradation of difficulty, etc. Any suggestions for improvement in this area are welcome.

Use of multiple themes: There's nothing in the rules that says you can't do that, so there. I didn't write any code before the start, other than my Albow library that I documented and released several months earlier. If you're not willing to take my word for that, there's nothing I can do about it.

Lesson learned for next time: Always test on Linux and Windows if at all possible before the deadline!

Future plans: I'm working on a post-competition update that I hope to release Real Soon Now. I'll also be releasing an updated version of Albow incorporating the improvements I made to it while developing this game.

Thanks for all the good ratings, and to all those who commented.

Greg

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Comments

richard on 2007/09/24 06:25:

I definitely liked this entry -- it was quite engaging :)