richard on 2010/06/17 00:00:

Whee!

Good luck :-)

Martin on 2010/06/19 03:22:

Hey Akake, good to see that you're back for this PyWeek.

I imagine you probably know this, but what you're talking about sounds crazy ambitious. I don't want to be a big downer here - I think it would be awesome if you completed what you're planning - but I want to make a few comments and suggestions that I think would be helpful..

Making a game in a week is hard. Making a game every week for two months is hella-crazy-hard. If I tried to do this, I'd lose interest after about two weeks and end up feeling like a failure. You've definitely got talent (Rose Ninja was really fun), but overstretching yourself is not the way to best make use of it. 

I understand the desire to have lots of finished projects, believe me, I do, but these things take time, and flexibility. I'd suggest that if you really want to warm up properly, you should just set yourself the task of working on a game until it's finished. This might not mean that it matches up with the idea you had when it started, and it almost certainly won't mean that you'll be finished within a week, but the hard part of Pyweek is finishing a game, not starting one, and that's the part that you should be practising.

If you're interested in criticism of what I've seen of your approach to date, I'd say that you tend to have overly rigid plans, and then to bail as soon as you realise that you're not going to make the game that you initially imagined. Don't let this bother you! All games change as you work on them, and in a lot of cases, the dreams you initially had end up going out the window. That doesn't make what you're doing a failure. 

The important thing is to be flexible. As it stands, you're posting plans for games that include crazily minute details, such as how many spaces a character can jump. There's no way you can possibly know what the best jump distance is before you've played the game yourself. When you have a detailed idea like this of how a game should be, you can't help but be disappointed with how things really turn out. On the other hand, if you adopt a more flexible "wait and see" approach, you'll be happier with how your game works out, and you'll produce better work.

Anyway, all of this is just my opinion - no doubt others would disagree with me. However, I think continuing to do more or less what you've done in the past will only lead to more or less the same results that you've had in the past - incomplete games and disappointment.

adrwen on 2010/06/19 12:08:

I'm all with Martin, I've really just been in one Pyweek, but the two ideas you had back then were, well, too complicated for one weeks time of programming. The first of your pre-Pyweek ideas really followed in the same tradition as your Pyweek participation, and so did the shift of ideas 17:00.

Not that MY game was really that fun or well produced or well coded or anything (your demos look much better to be  quite honest) but just to let you know what I had in mind originally:

The game was supposed to be about the whole language thing even from the very beginning, but rather than having "Hello, World!" style graphics and movement, I had this idea in my mind that it would be some sort of fast-paced side scroller where you wouldn't be able to see what was happening in the tunnel in front of you, but where someone with better knowledge of the tunnel would guide you through.

As you leveled up, your character would start to automatically follow directions from "someone" and you would acquire items, skills, money and xp (well you get the idea). Everything would eventually lead to your ability to finish quests that were given to you by the inhabitants of the cities at the ends of the tunnels. The quests would be given to you through conversation with the locals.

Obviously, the game became just a mere shadow of what I had imagined it to be, all the automation, RPG elements, items, quests, conversations and the money had to go, after a few hours of programming I realized that it just wasn't realistic to try to make such a game (I guess I really knew that at 2 AM when I came up with the idea too).

What I did was not to abandon it altogether, I just said to myself, in Swedish of course: "What is the soul of the game, is there any element of it that by itself conveys the idea or look 'n' feel of what I have imagined?"

I realized that it wasn't the fancy graphics, conversational elements or the action that were important, it was the "Hey, there's this really odd language here" thing that I really wanted to implement. The result was a much simpler game which I nearly finished (well, three levels isn't really all that much).

When I uploaded the game, I thought people were going to go all "What the hell is this?" and "Wow, I haven't had this much fun since I did the dishes yesterday!" (well most of them did). Surprisingly, several people actually seemed to like the game, even without all the bells and whistles, the language puzzle idea turned out to be enough for some to enjoy it. Of course, it's not like anybody thought it was the greatest game in the history of mankind and a few actually detested it, but it did get finished.

Morale: Adhere to the KISS principle, it works! Or to put it the same way as Wikipedia:

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler", Albert Einstein

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication", Leonardo da Vinci

"It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away", Antoine de Saint Exupéry

mauve on 2010/06/22 23:37:

I have lots of ideas, too, but some get too ambitious and others I launched into with enthusiasm but ran out of inspiration much sooner than I thought I would.

I've found it quite useful to have a wiki to collect ideas and flesh them out before actually starting work on them. Once you start collecting and cataloguing ideas (and also links and resources), you can try to form them into some kind of coherent shape and hopefully set to work on one great game.