Mega post part 2: compromises
eugman on 2008/03/29 20:21
of Awesome Block Game 4
Firstly, there seem to be a bunch of people either for or against robot/jig. The issue is that they seem to represent the wide ends of a certain spectrum.
Anyone could implement a robot game. Anyone. You could do a remake of robotfindskitten and it would count. So robot as a theme would lead to a bunch of well implemented varied games. The problem is they would be too varied and easy to make; the theme wouldn't actually act as any sort of creative constraint. No one is likely to go, "Wow, what a creative use of theme. I guess the proletariat are robots in a sense." It's gonna be lame.
At the other end you have jig which people are saying is this pyweeks twisted. It's just too hard to implement. It'll take some cleverness to implement but really there will just be games about irish dance, fishing and carpentry. Well, a few people will do something really neat but that's not enough reason to so painfully limit the whole contest. It's too narrowing. It's gonna be lame.
What's need is a theme which forces difficulty in implementation but the easiest way out has multiple possibilities so that way not everyone will default to the same thing.
Secondly, There's a compromise between coding ease and tester ease. I've decided I'm not going to make an exe. Everyone will have pygame installed and really I don't think anyone is wishing that much to be able to test on other computers. If I was using any other library I'd try to make an exe but in this case I just don't think it's worth the effort. A plain exe is never hard but I usually try to get an icon attached and make it so all the floating dlls are in a zip. that takes a while to figure out.
Finally, I am still trying to figue this one out: Quality vs innovation. I can't have both. Innovating means I try something I haven't done before. Like a online fighter game. With blocks. While I'm spending my limited pyweek time coding something that gives quickly diminishing returns i could be coding content, quality, and extra options.
I really want 5th place this time and I think I can do it. Unfortunately, that means not trying to make any sort of physics harder that I would for a shmup. It means not trying to do an rpg with no text.And for some reason I still feel like I'm obligated to try something crazy to see and show what's possible within the medium and the timeframe.
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Comments
viblo on
2008/03/29 23:15:
saluk on
2008/03/29 22:41:
Quality vs innovation - it can be done, but you kind of have to be lucky. The only way to do it is to aim for innovation and do the best job of it and hit on an innovative idea that does actually work. Predicting what will work is the catch. Quite often it's impossible to tell.Personally, when I rate pyweek games, I do tend to rate more for quality than for innovation. It's what wows me. But what I really would rather come away with is innovation. It may not show in the ratings, but I respect it much more than quality.
To me it is the point of game development competitions. With only a week, even if you work your hardest, quality is very hard to come by. It's a chance to break free from trying to make the perfect game, and experiment with new ideas. With only a few exceptions, every pyweek game I've played could have used a few weeks of polish on top of what they did.