What screwed you up last time?

eugman on 2008/08/28 13:01

I think it might be useful for people to know what big problems people faced last pyweek. I think mine was lack of focus and starting off on the wrong plan. I didn't really make anything innovative because I was so busy trying to make a game.

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Comments

Martin on 2008/08/28 13:07:

I wouldn't say it screwed us up, but we spent quite a lot of our time wrestling with bugs and memory leaks in an (at the time) alpha release of a library (pyglet 1.1). Alex Holkner was really helpful, fixing issues as we discovered them, but I think we still lost quite a bit of time tracking down bugs that turned out not to be in our code. This time around, we're going to be spend more time tracking down our own bugs!

pymike on 2008/08/28 14:19:

I certainly wasn't screwed up in my solo. However, my team entry consisted of 2 people, and we didn't have very good communication.

nikolajbaer on 2008/08/28 16:33:

I spent alot of time working on fun things to make (particle systems, neat atmospheric visual effects), but ultimately my game (robosub) just wasn't fun. Hah. This time I think I need to focus on FUN. I am also trying real hard to get up to speed on 3d, as I want to be able to do that too.

RB[0] on 2008/08/28 18:15:

We spent 2.5 days on networking, and we ran into a couple bugs in both twisted and pure sockets (not in them, just our implementation it turns out ;) ).

This time around we have 3 backup's for out networking code, so it should work, and we have more programmers so some of us can devote to it the whole week :)

PyScripter on 2008/08/28 18:36:

Mine problem was that i had very little experience. I had never written a sidescrolling game before and my collision detection was terrible.

sjbrown on 2008/08/28 18:53:

Illness and lack of inspiration were my banes last time. :(

Treeform on 2008/08/29 03:42:

i had lack of time for the last one.

ArmchairArmada on 2008/08/29 19:18:

I had the same problems sjbrown did. I was sick all week and I simply couldn't think of a game idea I really wanted to work on. This PyWeek I have a lot of ideas for how I want to write my game engine, so even if I don't immediately come up with a good idea I could still get a lot of work done on it.

dmoisset on 2008/09/04 23:13:

Oh I can mention several things where I have screwed up in previous pyweeks

  • Not giving enough time to playtest/fix/retest, adding features that change playability until the last minute.
  • Getting sick all week long :-/
  • Putting mathematical/algorithmical perfection over playability (sometimes the most precise simulation is not what is "intuituve" for the player)
  • Not testing enough
  • Implementing physics for a game where simple heuristics were ok.
  • Using buggy libraries
  • Not planning time to test
  • Not knowing the tech well enough (although I usually do this intentionally, even knowing that it is not good, as a way to learn :) )
  • Did I mention how important it is to game test if you want to make sure that there is fun in the gameplay?

And probably there's more...