Postmortem. (Baaaaah... human.. fleeeeesh....)

ServalKatze on 2009/05/05 21:19 of Lawn of the Dead [by Team zahmeKatzen]
— edited on 2009/05/05 21:47

Ok, so Zahme had to go to work and I had to visit university classes during Pyweek. Yet this entry feels like the most complete game we've ever submitted. It seems a little embarrasing... as if we'd been just lazy during the previous Pyweeks. XD

Of course, that's not quite right. Since we knew we'd be busy, we decided that our game should be simple, not too many graphics and easy to code. So we came up with the usual overly ambitious idea and a very simple idea per theme.

Our initial idea for "Get off my Lawn" was a rather boring "Hit-the-Mole" game. You need to defend your precious lawn against molesting moles. Destroy their molehills (with a hammer or something) - and if you don't destroy them in time a mole would look out of the molehill and laugh at you. Vicious creatures. ;)

When the theme was announced, we talked a little more about the mole-game and I mentioned the word "Shotgun" (you need some kind of powerup, right?). That reminded Zahme of another game.. and so Lawn of the Dead* was born.

The basics of the game were already done on Sunday. The character - a cat picture - was moveable, turned to the mouse pointer and shot deadly bullets at sloths. And the sloths moved towards the cat with zombie-like determination... Using placeholder art is actually quite fun. I made a version with 5 cat pictures that always rotated towards the mouse cursor - just because it looked funny... And it's nice when you finally see the real graphics in a playable game.

Meanwhile, Zahme pixeled some zombies and a lawn. He found a nice font for the logo and made some buttons. He actually wanted to create some more zombies (with missing limbs) but inventing 43 perks and making images for them takes quite some time - even if you have a whole week.

I may extract and document the game's "engine" and use it for Pyggy. If we can still pick older game entries (for Pyggy) we could finally finish VoCFI or Slider or C.A.T.:B.O.T... We don't have any good ideas on how to expand Lawn of the Dead but we'll release a less buggy after-pyweek version (with less typos). Soon. ^^

Well, thank you for a busy but fun week. I'll go and test the other games now.

*We had just watched Shaun of the Dead.