Postmortem and some lessons learned
Tee on 2008/09/16 23:52
of People and Planes
My performance in this particular Pyweek was probably one of the worst. I had no problems with the theme, but I slammed my face into several walls. It turned out ok in the end, but I still wish I had made a decent game. The neat thing about Pyweek is that every Pyweek there's always something new to learn. This time, time wasn't much of a constraint, I blame my mistakes more. So I'd like to talk a bit about my week of Pyweek; despite the failure, it was actually quite unusual.
In the beginning, I had no idea what I was going to do. So I planned a simple platformer with string swinging and climbing and more stringy actions and decided to do it. I needed some rope/string physics, so, knowing that it would take too long for me to do that by hand, I picked Box2D. It was fairly smooth to use it and in the beginning things were well. Eventually, I was able to make a reasonably decent string that got longer or shorter. But then I realized I wasted too much time just tweaking the string, and decided to go with a different idea I had while playing with the string.
So far, things were okay. I had an interesting theme planned out to cover the mechanic. The basic mechanic was that you controlled an invisible ball with eyes that was attached below the string, and the physics made it feel like you were a string ghost, which felt really nice and cool. But I wasted a few days on it before realizing two lessons.
1. Be precise on your design, especially if your game isn't tried-and-true. My game involved shoving things away with white string and destroying things with black string, but I didn't realize how badly they could interfere with each other, considering they were parts of the same string. The problem in my design was that I didn't realize that it would be hard for the player to do what he wants, which brings me to lesson 2.
2. If you are unsure about how an element behaves with another element, be sure about it before putting those two elements together in the game. So after I realized my string was so hard to control, I decided to tweak it. And tweak it more. And so I spent a lot of time tweaking it to see if I could make the string easier to control. Putting joints there, removing joints here, adjusting parameters, etc. Eventually I had something I was somewhat satisfied with, but I had wasted a lot of time.
Also, having an interesting theme somewhat blinded my view of the mechanics. I had this really interesting, artsy idea where the string would represent life and white string and black string would represent good and evil respectively, there were several cool features about it, and I kept insisting on it, even with the mechanics not working out well. A possible third lesson here is to make clear view of your mechanics, try to see if they work well without what's on top of it (theme, rules independent of the mechanics, graphics, etc).
At that point, it was already Friday. I realized things just wouldn't work when I stumbled into more incompatibilities between design and physics. So at that point I decided to scrap my theme, but I liked the idea of that ghost-like string, it looked even nicer when it was glowing, and I didn't want to waste it, so I kept it. That was another mistake, sometimes you just have to scrap everything and start over (that's a hard one to learn and even harder to identify when you have to do that).
The third idea was very simple: there would be several enemies with black and white "weak points", and if you touched them with the same color, they would get stuck to your string. Also, if you made a weak point touch another weak point of the same color, they would stick together. The goal was to destroy enemies by "sticking" all the weak points to something. That sounded pretty cool, but there was a technical problem. It's a technical lesson, but, anyway, joints might not be as tight as you want. The thing was that, to make things easier, the weak points were different bodies from the enemies themselves, with joints attached. The problem was that they either kept distancing themselves from the enemies, or when one enemy was attached to another, they kept distancing from each other (this depended on how I tweaked the masses). I managed to have something reasonable except for fast or wacky movements, but there were two more problems.
First, the game felt like a Frankenstein. Nothing connected. There was the ghost string, there were the enemies, but there was no reason for them to be together. It just didn't feel good, next time I should keep in mind that every element of a game should be well connected. Second, the tipping point that made me give up was that my game not only crashed, but also crashed the computer, for the second time. Sure, it was only twice, and there were other programs running which could also be the culprit, but I just didn't want to risk handing out a game that might crash someone's computer.
Anyway, at that point I had only eight hours left, and I felt like I should give up. But I really wanted to submit a game, and those eight hours were mostly clear, so I picked an idea I had before, scrapped everything and decided to do it. I made a really simple and rough approximation to a string, drew some planes, drew some people, added the code, and finished a simple game. I never managed to finish a Ludum Dare, but, ironically, I managed to finish an eight hour game in Pyweek. I felt kinda glad, but I still feel bad for wasting an entire week. The good thing about it is that it actually made me feel a bit more confident for a LD, and there were a lot of lessons learned. A last interesting lesson is that sometimes you do better with a totally different idea in just a few hours rather than sticking with another idea for a week, although I think it's very hard to identify these situations, but it's good to know that situations like those exist.
It was fun, though. I've never tried to implement four different ideas in one Pyweek. I haven't gotten around to play the games yet, I still have to catch up with my usual postponing of things first, but I will when I find the time, there seem to be a lot of fun games. Sorry for the long post, but if you're still reading, thanks for reading. :)
(log in to comment)
saluk on
2008/09/17 05:19:
What an adventure! There are some good lessons in here. Some of them (such as knowing when to scrap an idea) are lessons that often need to be learned more than once. I know I have stuck with, not bad ideas, but unproducable ideas, many times before. I have one unfinished game that I think I spent nearly 6 months on, with no real direction. Having a strong direction and sticking to it is very important. Almost moreso than having the direction be wrong. So if you are clinging to an idea waiting for the pieces to come together, there may be a chance that those pieces just don't connect.By the way, that string that you have to connect to the right colors sounds pretty neat. It's too bad the technical issues prevented it.