Bot Builder 2000 Post Mortem

bjorn on 2008/04/23 07:20 of Bot Builder 2000

Well, I really feel that I accomplished the goal I had set at the beginning - a working game at the end. Next pyweek I intend to be a bit more ambitious, but since it was a first crack at python for my teammates I feel we did really well.

Having said that, the scores were not quite as high as I was expecting, but after I read the comments I felt better. Disregaurding the several 1,1,1 - apparently did not work but they didn't check the DNW box - type ratings might put the numbers right where I would expect them.

Most of the issues people encountered we were already aware of, just ran out of time to do any gameplay balancing at the end. I'll have to make sure and save a day for that next time

So now for the standard-ish response to specific feedback:


I'm impressed. A complete game that follows the theme and works without fiddling!

Thanks!

it is hard.

Actually, it's far too easy. I had a hard time too at first (level 2 was too tough), but once you get the hang of it there's unfortunately very little challenge.

Very nice job on the game! It was quite a bit of fun, and though I had to read the README to learn how to play, it was a real blast once I got the hang of it! I got to level 7 before I even started to get a little bored, and I continued on to level 9 just to see if there was any more of the storyline to be revealed. All told, very well done! :) I liked the premise -- it was cute. The graphics and music were very good, and I *really* liked how smoothly the gripper-hand moved -- timing the placement of the hand is a pretty good strategy element, and so it's fun to optimize. You guys did a good job of balancing the game and not making it too hard or too easy -- well done!

Yes, next time I'm going to aim to have a tutorial so it's not necesarry to read the readme to figure out how to play. We weren't really happy with the lack of intuitiveness of what to do when the robot is complete either, but we will be fixing that in a post pyweek version. (there were just a few things that we really just can't let stand in whatevr final version it comes to)

It didn't work: IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'data/story01.png'

Ok, then please rate it DNW instead of the 1,1,1 you gave it :P (if you'd checked my bug diary entry or the wiki you'd have found this was trivial to fix)

Hey, guys: you should make clear which version of pyglet you're using :) I forgot to set up the path with pyglet1.0 and it worked quite bad.

Sorry. I didn't bother including that because pyglet 1.1 is supposed to be backward compatible! That'll teach me to just assume it works as documented :)

I couldn't select an option @ menu. Linux user.

That's odd. You did try using the mouse didn't you? (there's no keyboard support in menu besides the esc key).

this type of game just isnt fun at all for me.

Fair enough, me neither :D. I believe the main demographic for this game type is middle aged women.

The game don´t work, but i don´t know why! I am a graphic artist.

Surely there was a stack trace? I hear python provides those even for graphic artists.

Creative and pretty fun!

Good, we were hoping it'd be fun :)

Well done. I played through to level 12. Things should speed up as you go along!

Agreed. We didn't have time to balance gameplay. Ideally it should eventually get impossibly hard - either that or at some point you "win".

Odd: The game seems to get easier with each level you reach. But I bet younger ones will have fun with this game.

Yep. Post pyweek release will get harder w/ each level. . . somehow.

Decent game but not my style, not nearly enough challenge

Actually, I expected more of this sort of reaction; didn't figure there'd be a lot of overlap between the people that liked this sort of game and the types who think writing a game is fun.

Good game, well designed , decent gameplay

:)

Interesting concept. I'd like to see more balance to the gameplay though -- waiting for parts just doesn't pay off very well. A suggestion: the ability to pick up a piece and put it back down without having to build it on something. Would add a 'conveyor management' element of gameplay so you keep the parts around you want to work with, allowing faster conveyor belt speed and more action for the user.

Actually, you can put the piece back down on the conveyor, or drop it in the recycle. The tough part is you have to find enough space on the conveyor because you can't overlap pieces. Turning up the conveyor speed would actually have the side effect of having more empty space for putting pieces down on, so I'll try that and see how it feels. The other option is generating random parts slower.

Kinda tough to control. Took a while to figure out that I could place the stuff back on the conveyor because sometimes it wouldn't let me.

Yea, I chose to not let pieces overlap on the conveyor - I think mostly because it looked better. Maybe the gameplay suffers for that, I'm not sure.

File "C:\Users\saluk\Downloads\pyweek6games\BotBuilder2000-1.1\lib\credits.py", line 20, in __init__ self.textList.append(pygletfont.Text(self.font, line, x = 800 / 2, y = sy, halign = pygletfont.Text.CENTER)) ... File "build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg/pyglet/text/layout.py", line 854, in _get_left TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for //: 'NoneType' and 'int'

We seem to have quite a few crashes related to the fonts on the credit screen, but all the stack traces are different (I deleted the other two because they were lengthy). And I haven't seen it on any of our machines, so it's going to be hard to fix. I wonder though if it has to do with the pyglet version. . .

Got the game to work by deleting the halaign argument. The game ran really slow, and clicking on parts didn't seem to work very well (sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.)

We didn't get to spend any time optimizing - I know it doesn't run very well on slow hardware.

Nice idea and story, but the game is not very challenging after all. Especially as you can get a negative bank balance, you could just build all robots by yourself by buying all parts - this could also be done fast enough to earn a lot of money in the end (especially as you get $5 per completed robot, while it only costs you $3 to construct one)...

yea, the $1 per part and $5 for sale was just what we started with and never did have a chance to find the right values. you're right though, there's little incentive to use the random parts when it's so cheap to just buy them.

A neat idea. Way to slow to play (hand moves like molasses) and it's rather boring. Great use of the theme, and nice story intro.

I'd kind of like to have a more integrated story next time, but thanks.

Fun: I played the first 4 levels with joy but after level 5 there wasn't enough challenge to keep me playing. Maybe you could made the time limit a little bit tougher or introduce a point limit the player has to reach. But so every level was as the one before but with more robots to build, which was initialy fun. Innovation: Nice idea to make a puzzle game where you have to construct robots out of different parts. Production: You have nice graphics and sound effects that does not become annoying. They fit very well. Also i encountered no bugs and the help in the README.txt did a good job. Overall: Nice game which was fun for the first levels.

Thank you. You've summed it up quite well I think