pæranoia: Postmortem

Tee on 2011/09/20 23:12 of Tee-py13
— edited on 2011/09/20 23:14

I usually finish with a game that's unpolished and at least has a little progress and an ending. This time, I ended up with the opposite: a game that turned out to be polished the part you play it and has no progress or ending. There's sound, music and graphics that turned out fine. It's more of a vertical slice. Also, I didn't try to be as experimental as I usually do.

It was fun to change my process, but I'm not sure I'll be doing it again. I think I prefer a complete and unpolished game rather than an incomplete and polished one. I barely could implement the theme mechanic, which would have a greater impact later on. I had a nice and creepy story planned but none of it was used. There was a lot of work to do and I didn't have enough time — maybe games like this would be better done in a team. It was interesting to do it this way, but I think next time I'll be back to my unpolished "complete" games.
 
As for the game itself, it's so short that there's not much to say. I like the title and how the title screen turned out. I think (I hope) it's a bit scary, especially with the background music and sounds. Besides the framework, I intended to have essentially two mechanics in the game, curtains and mutations. I like the curtain mechanic as it makes you anxious about what will happen when you open it, not to mention things that you might stumble upon while walking towards the curtain. I was going to make better use of the mutate mechanic if I had the time: it's a simple mechanic yet it's effective to keep the player on his toes, especially if you add randomness to it (which was the original intention).

The original idea of the game was to use mutations to make the player paranoid of everything, hence the title and the mutating "a". I think it would've been a great use of theme if I could play with that, to have the actual theme be the source of fear. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to even touch that idea, but I think it was a promising one.

I used DR0ID's tiledtmxloader for loading maps and I liked it, although I admit I've struggled with it quite a bit during this Pyweek. I should've checked it out before the challenge started. At least next time I already know how to use it. Anyway, thanks, DR0ID.
 
It'll take less than 5 minutes to play the game, but I hope you enjoy it. :) As usual, I love verbose feedbacks, so please let me know what you think (although I guess there's not much to say this time).

This time unfortunately I might not have much time to play and rate other games, but I'll try to play some of them.
 
As always, thanks to Richard for continuing to host Pyweeks. :)