Shadows Dawn - Aftermath

ServalKatze on 2008/09/28 13:52 of Legends of Kiralia: Shadows Dawn [by Team zahmeKatzen]

Phew.. Our final submission was rather unfinished and buggy (sorry), so I'm glad that some people enjoyed it, anyway. Many annoyances could have been fixed within the extra-hour after the deadline but we decided to watch Neon Genesis Evangelion instead. ;)

Day 0
We wanted to do an RPG this Pyweek, although not all themes were suitable for that. Now, we had a very nice idea for Dust Bunnies and decend ones for Punk, Morning Fog and Frosts and Flat-Packed. The String-theme was our (my) least favourite because our initial idea was a platformer with a rope-throwing-and-swinging character. I had no clue where to start with the physics. In retrospect I guess it would have worked out somehow - just like so many things tend to work out somehow during Pyweek.

Day 1
We fell asleep while waiting for the theme announcement. Luckily, I woke up just in time to read... "Length.. of.. a.. piece.. of.. string.." (I could barely keep my eyes open)

Oh, great. Zahmekoses was just as happy as me.

However, after some more sleep and a rather disturbing dream (a rottweiler mauled one or two poodles) I came up with a story-fragment that Zahme could turn into a little story. The "collect all pieces of string"-part was not too original, but acceptable. The map-editor was basically finished that day.

Day 2 to 5
We made.. stuff. I wasted some time on features that were never used later (character conditions) or tried to fix things repeatedly (inventory, battlescreen). Although the map-editor and the first tileset were done we didn't create any maps. By the end of day 5 we had some disconnected parts of a game. We were rather unproductive..

Day 5 to 7
Zahme finally finished the character images so he was free to create some content. So we added items, monsters, worldmaps, dungeonmaps and towns. The intro, start-, and gameover-screens and save/loadgame functions were all squeezed in two hours before deadline. So I never got to use the sounds included in the game.

So in the end..
We never got around to do some testing. Or I didn't manage to write error-free code. Yeah, that's the problem - just don't put any bugs into your games! ^^

We could claim that we've bitten off more than we could chew, but that wouldn't be true. The game content was created too late so we didn't have enough time to test and balance everything. The final submission was almost finished... it just didn't work properly.

Well, I've fixed most issues, so all that is left to do is add sounds and create 2 tunes. Zahme should do some sort of outro. So, this time we'll really upload a post-pyweek final. Really. Soon.

Next Pyweek I'll be a lot meaner, ruthlessly cut features (instead of worrying about something that won't be used, anyway) and poke Zahmekoses to do more content early on.

See you next time! :)