Post mortem of someone who failed to finish ANY game dev competition

ArmchairArmada on 2008/09/15 04:52 of ArmchairArmada PyWeek 7
— edited on 2008/09/15 04:53

One of these days I will actually have something to show people. When? I'm not sure. I can comment on a few things I learned from this PyWeek, the last Ludum Dare, the Mini Ludum Dare two months ago, and a few other previous competitions.

The first observation I could make is that even though Ludum Dare is only two days long, both times I accomplished a lot more than I ever had during any of my PyWeek attempts. This may be due to the following reasons:

• With the Ludum Dares I quickly came up with a game idea and just went with it. I didn't worry about whether it was good or not because if they were bad it would have been only two days wasted. With PyWeek I struggled for a long time trying to come up with an idea I liked, and didn't really come up with anything I felt was good enough.
• Having more time seems to make me more lazy. It's easy to think, "I have a week, that's more than enough time." On the other hand, when I have only a short amount of time I'm thinking, "This has to get done NOW!"
• Going along with the above two points, having less time and a more definite idea kept me more focused. I spent most of my time this PyWeek rather idly tinkering with a graphics engine -- which I didn't really have to do.
• Although making 3D graphics and animation is fun, 2D can be quicker (depending on a lot of factors, of course.) I was more satisfied with the side scrolling platformer I tried making during the Mini Ludum Dare than with any of the other competition attempts -- it was fun, easy, and fairly quick to make. Oddly enough more was accomplished during the 3D Ludum Dare attempt than during this PyWeek (though they very similar designs.) I think it's easier to overlook an engine's design problems when there is too little time to worry about it (though there were really only a few problems, namely compiling OpenGL display lists seemed very slow and I didn't have any text capabilities.)
• Not being able to use PyODE the way I wanted to had taken a lot of wind out of my sails. Simpler game dynamics seems to allow for more rapid development.

Some things I will try to remember when the next PyWeek rolls around:

• Come up with a game idea immediately! It doesn't matter if it's a great idea, it just has to be clearly defined. I need to know what I'm working towards. I didn't come up with a real idea for PyWeek until Thursday.
• It might be good to stick with 2D. Though I enjoy making 3D models and animation, the programming aspect seems more difficult, time consuming, and error prone -- especially if collision detection is involved.
• I should not write a graphics or physics engine. Going along with the above point, a lot more could have been accomplished if I simply used pyglet -- especially when it comes to menus and text. Trying to write my own text engine in OpenGL feels like a waste of time.
• Get working gameplay up and running before anything else -- hopefully on the first day even. It's too easy to work on other little things (graphics, engine features, etc.) and keep pushing back actual gameplay development. If every day there's a working game then when the deadline finally arrives I would not be stuck with something unplayable.
• Remember to have fun. A couple of times over the past week programming just felt like too much of a chore. I think it was mainly because I did not have a clear goal to focus on, but, as a whole, the process of creating should be fun. I don't have to worry about whether or not anybody would enjoy my game -- I should just enjoy making it.