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cyhawk on 2009/05/17 07:43 of LAWN: Terror From The Green
— edited on 2009/05/18 07:34

LAWN:TFTG came in second, thanks for the votes! Congratulations to Cosmologicon and the Happy Insect Garden team! I think they were the games with the most character and charm, and this made them memorable and lovable. (This means I will have to up the charm for PyWeek 9... Expect more pink ponies! :))

In the hopes that some of my judges read this post, could you elaborate a bit on what the problem with controls was? A number of comments I received mentioned control problems, like this one:

Controls infuriated me, and I couldn't enjoy the game. Great idea though.

Finding good controls really needs outside input, because the creator of a game can bear with any crazy control scheme without noticing the awkwardness of it. The friends I sent the game to only returned DNW (looks like mipmap generation is not a guaranteed feature in Pyglet), so until I trick them into playing an updated version, your input would be very educational for me!

Many comments mention that who hears what is not made clear and this detracts from the game. This is a good point, thanks! It did not occur to me, because hearing was a late addition to the game and only gained importance when I made the levels, which was the last night. And also because it was obvious to me who heard what, since I wrote the code for it :).

Thanks for the fun contest! I'll be back!

Note: I will upload an updated version that fixes the numlock and mipmap bugs soon, so if you would like to try it, please wait a bit and try the fixed version for a better experience!

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Comments

Cosmologicon on 2009/05/17 08:29:

Hmm.... I was fine with the controls once I got used to them, but they did take some getting used to. I can guess what those judges are talking about, but unfortunately, I don't know the best way to fix it.

First, it was a little weird that turning is a separate action from moving. My intuition says that if that's how it is, the left/right arrow should turn the kid 90 degrees left/right, and up should step forward. But this would make it worse, I'm sure. Generally the distinction between strafing and normal movement was a little tough to grasp. I seem to recall that you can't strafe onto a sprinkler valve? If I were designing the game, I would just ignore the kids' orientation altogether; I don't remember it adding much to the gameplay. (The old men's orientation, of course, is crucial.) Or maybe have a tutorial level where you need to use both kinds of movement somehow?

Second, passing the ball. You need to click on the square in front of the kid who's receiving it, right? You should probably make it so that clicking on the receiver himself also passes it. And maybe if there's only one possible square you can pass it to, make it so you don't even need to specify: it just passes automatically when you click on the ball.

Other than that, I don't remember any control issues. Dragging the screen to scroll and clicking or tabbing to select kids works well. It would be good if the screen scrolled to keep up with kids who move off the edge, but no big deal.

Anyway, I didn't get to your entry until the last day of judging, because of the mipmap thing. But I was very glad that I did! I agree with the judge who was impressed that this was a solo entry. Really, great game.

cyhawk on 2009/05/17 08:52:

Thanks a lot, I understand the problems now! :) Kids' orientation is important in hard mode, which was the intended default until I realized how frustrating it could become to a first time player. If someone finished the game on easy though, hard could be an enjoyable challenge. In hard mode dogs and old people are only drawn if a kid sees them. If I figure out how to best solve this, I might enter the game in Pyggy.

I'm looking forward to a Pyggy edition of Panspermia too! What I hope to see would be an effect of rotation on gameplay (like maybe having a light source on one side that affects plant growth?) and more levels that introduce game mechanics gradually.

adam on 2009/05/17 10:10:

I had some problems with the responsiveness of the controls. Because the kids move so slowly, it's easy to tap a key and not have it do anything because the last move hasn't quite finished yet, when often it felt like the keypresses were separate enough that the game should have been able to figure out my intent. Selecting things with the mouse was also frustrating; it seems like one can put the mouse into a position where the kid's name appears under the cursor, but if you then click the kid isn't selected. When you click and it doesn't have the desired effect, there's not much feedback about why it didn't work or what the game thinks you wanted to do instead, which makes it feel as if the controls just aren't responding all of the time. It was also frustrating having to go back and forth from keyboard (only way to move kids) to mouse (only way to pass).

Nice game, though. I feel as though you could have made the mechanics more explicit and presented it as a puzzle game rather than a tactical game, since that's how it felt anyway.

cyhawk on 2009/05/17 10:25:

@adam: Thanks, good points! Do the kids really move too slowly? In theory one movement should take half a second. If it took longer then you had framerate issues. I had some during development, but it mysteriously disappeared after I did a few things (like running with python -O). Also the problem with selection is interesting. The intent was that whereever you click, the closest kid is selected, so there is no need for any degree of accuracy. I will look into what may have gone wrong here. I will also try to find some sort of solution for the other points.

About presenting it as a tactical game versus a puzzle game: You are right of course, but you know how it is — I started writing a tactical game and ended up with a puzzle game accidentally :).

adam on 2009/05/17 10:31:

cyhawk: experimenting with it again, moving kids in straight lines is fine and doesn't feel too slow. However, after you turn, there's a tiny period of dead time in which keypresses are ignored. I think that's what was giving me the feeling of unresponsive controls. (Although, half a second to move on square is pretty slow when you consider that there are times when you want to walk a kid for six or seven squares and nothing else interesting is going on during that time.)

cyhawk on 2009/05/17 10:46:

Right! I will try skipping to the end of the turn on key press. If it feels too jumpy that way then I'll add a queue and try varying the speed of animation so that no matter how many instructions are queued, the end of all animations is never further than one second away. If it still doesn't feel right after that, I'll just throw it out :).

pymike on 2009/05/17 15:51:

I wrote "Controls infuriated me, and I couldn't enjoy the game. Great idea though." - all the points by Cosmo and adam were what frustrated me. Perhaps if you controlled orientation with mouse pointing, and movement with the keys, that'd feel better. As it is, it feels sluggish and unresponsive.

cyhawk on 2009/05/17 16:48:

@pymike: Your brain operates on higher clock speeds than mine, as evidenced by your crazy speedruns :).

pymike on 2009/05/17 19:55:

Haha, guess so :)