post-mortem

bitcraft on 2011/10/01 18:34 of worldwarriors

Pyweek #2: done!

It was a whirlwind of coding, although not much of a game came out of it.  As I was developing the game, I kept a journal of ideas to add.  Over the week, I just had a ton on inspiration, but I think that the idea was not really a good fit for a week deadline.

Things I did right:

*  Good games come from good ideas, so I spent the first day brainstorming and developing ideas (i also didn't have time to code!)

*   Breaking down elements of the game into manageable chunks, setting goals for each (i.e.: next hour get the input working)

*   Using an established codebase (lib2d from my last pyweek)

*   Research into genetic algorithms helped a lot

*   Using Tiled for map creation

Things that I didn't do right:

*   Being waaaay too ambitious

*   Getting stuck on details

*   Not spending time on art, sounds, music

*   Literally in the last hours, modifying the map rendering system!

The concept that I had in mind in bullet points:

*   the core mechanic would be that monsters could breed with each other

*   you could capture them as well, selectively breed them for qualities that you liked

*   use them as pets

*   if you were clever enough, you could release your bred creatures into wild populations

*   get the other monitors to interbreed with itt

*   the populations would have home areas, and all have similar traits

Maybe, one group is tough to kill because they run quickly. so you release slow moving creatures in that area, and maybe in a couple generations they will be easier to kill/catch.

Since the end of this pyweek, I've worked out a few bugs and maybe in a couple weeks, I'll have more to show for the game.  I really like the concept and I'm going to continue tinkering with it for a while.

A few people have talked to me about Lib2d, which I'm going to package separately and document some.

The most important features of Lib2d that helped the pyweek were:

*   Simple ini fie based animations

*   Fast multi-layer tilemap renderer, (threaded, too!)

*   Solid state-management that [imo] simplifies and consolidates input, displays, and game flow

*   "Avatar" class for animated sprites with multiple directions

I also used DRI0D's tmx loader, but I've since abandoned it since I couldn't really figure out how to use it with the latest version.

There is a repackaged version of the game (i'll just call it MH) with the renderer fixed, a new tmx loader, and a draft of the script that I wrote for the story.

Now, who wants to draw me some sprites?  ^_^