Cosmologicon's postmortem

Cosmologicon on 2009/12/01 22:26 of Flight Crew
— edited on 2009/12/01 22:27

This was a team entry with kent_turbo, but I haven't heard from him much lately, so I don't know what he thinks about how it all turned out.

I technically worked on a team for Pyweek #7, but only for one day, and then only on the intro cutscene. This was my first "real" team experience. It was great in that I never would have been able to put together an engine like this - based on ODE and OpenGL - by myself. It was definitely the most ambitious game I've worked on to date. It was also motivating to see someone else working on it. Given how frequently I flake out of projects, I think that's probably the biggest plus. I'm also proud of the fact that we collaborated despite not knowing each other. It seems like almost all successful PyWeek teams are people who already know each other, though I could be wrong.

It was hard with only two people on the team. Both Kent and I had periods when we couldn't work on it as much as we would have liked, so the other was solo for a few days. For me, being less familiar with the engine, trying to implement a save feature by myself was frustrating, and wound up just being a waste of time. I also think next time I'll try to communicate more via IRC or something real-time. Email is generally fine except that it's slow.

In conclusion, I would work on a team again. Maybe even for PyWeek #10. But I hope to have at least 3 people next time.

As for non-team-related stuff that was new to me, I like Google Code, except that it took like a week before we could email each other through the group, so it probably wouldn't work for PyWeek. I like version control okay. I like PyOpenGL. I haven't warmed up to PyODE yet, although once we got collision detection going it became clear how useful it was.

And I really like Blender! You can see I got much better at it between when I did the main character's model (which was one of the first things) and the townspeople (which was one of the last). I still wish we could have gotten an actual artist on the team, though!

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Comments

kent_turbo on 2009/12/02 00:51:

I'm bad with writing long texts, so I just comment here, instead of writing a full post.

This was my first real team experience. I agree with Cosmologicon on the motivation bit - knowing that someone's working too is a great motivator allright.

We did a lot of planning for the game, although I'd say we should have done more. Pyggy has a very different timescale from PyWeek, and a more detailed plan (or more structured) could help. Maybe even a schedule.

There were no surprises from tools used, although somewhere halfway into the work I wished we had a real scenegraph system - it would make things much faster and simpler in certain cases.

Cosmologicon did a great job with the game content, all models and quests were designed by him. I'm a totally artistically incapable person, so he was a lifesaver for this game.