Day 7 - Nearly finished and an outlook into the future (Pyggy)

Zahmekoses on 2011/04/09 19:23 of Nanji the Ninja and the Nine Ninja Signets [by Team zahmeKatzen]

Well, Serval is currently underway implementing some last minute changes and generally polishing the game here and there, but all in all our PyWeek entry is ready to be considered "final" [upload will follow shortly after this post].

Despite me hoping to write more than 2 Diary entries during this PyWeek, I failed at this miserably. Work was more stressful than I initially hoped which effectively kept me from writing Diary entries during the week (and also kept me from doing any graphics until Thursday evening). But while I'm not satisfied with the variance in our graphics, we still have enough for a neat looking PyWeek game.

Our independent expert - Zahmekoses (artist of zahmeKatzen) - recommends: If possible, try to run our game in Fullscreen (Pressing F12 ingame) to fully enjoy the provided graphics.

Our game is "complete" in terms of "we have a tutorial level", "all nine clans are implemented with nine different levels", "basic Jump & Run gameplay is implemented", "we have an outro".
Our levels do lack a bit of originality as the objects that we can use in our levels at this time are only gras and stone plattforms, but the potential to improve on this end is definitvely there and we already have some plans to improve this half of the game.

Thus, while this PyWeek is not even over yet, Serval and I already compiled a list of items that we want and will change during the upcoming Pyggy challenge (at the same time this list can be seen as a list of items we initially wanted to have in this game, but sadly were not able to implement in the time available to us :( ):

• Intro before tutorial level to explain the story so far
• each clan receives two levels - one outside and one inside the Dojo
• each clan receives a unique Boss that needs to be killed to obtain the clan signet
• Moving Platforms
• Locked Doors were the key first needs to be found within that level
• Walljumping
• Smoke-Bombs
• Caltrops
• Melee Attack (unsure if we really need this)
• More Animations (Getting Hit, Dying, Walljumping, Swimming?)
• More Tiles in General (Spikes, Water, Sand, ...)
• custom backgrounds and tilesets for each clan
• parallax scrolling/backgrounds (also each specific for every clan)
• various kinds of Ninjats (Katana-Ninjats, Shuriken-Ninjats, Yari-Ninjats, etc.) with different abilities and stats
• special abilities for clan ninjats depending on clan (More HP for Sei-Clan, Fireballs for Ka-Clan, etc.)
• Adding more Shinobi-Like gameplay and reducing the "Jump on your enemies until dead"-part
• More/Nicer Music (Currently only Level-Music is present; need to add Music for Intro, Level-Selection, Outro, ...)
• More in-game dialogue (and monologue) to provide background information on the individual clans and include various plot points driving the story forward (and foreshadowing the coming events more effectively)
• New & refined Sounds
• Bigger Levels (and better game performance with bigger levels)
• Achievement System? (Never tried one, would be interesting to create one)
• Less Bugs
• Less Glitches
• More Fun! :D

Nevertheless, I personally had quite a lot of fun during this PyWeek as I actually learned some new neat "MS-Paint Pixel Artist"-skills and tricks; and I think even Serval had some fun - as long as she stops thinking about how awful her current code looks like and that she needs to tidy it up during the next Pyggy, etc.

Thanks richard for the PyWeek and good luck to the other contestants!