Unvisible post mortem

paulpaterson on 2014/10/27 21:15 of Unvisible

Thanks to all who played and rated my game. I've very grateful to all for the helpful comments.

Many people commented that my game was too random and that the dice weighed much too heavily in the outcome compared to the cards that you played. This is definitely true.

I did play quite a few rounds myself after the submission deadline and the game played much more like patience than a game of strategy and skill. I could defintely improve my chances of making it through six contracts but I only ever came even slightly close to wining six of them one time!

Anyone who made it passed six contracts will see that I didn't even put in any special UI for winning as I suspected it was impossible with the tuning as it was!

I am happy that everyone seemed to get the idea of the game. That was one of my main worries once I got started. I had chosen a card game as I thought I could build a relatively simple engine and hoped to get some emergent gameplay (from the randomness) quite cheaply, and I knew I didn't have too much time to develop the game.

However, once I got started I noticed that I needed to spend much more time making the flow of the game events transparent to the user than I had anticipated. This was quite a learning for me. Although the game engine was simple, the game state was complex and communicating this state and developing the players concept of the state required work on the UI, visuals, and sound.

As an example, the game was fully playable, and essentially didn't change, by the end of day 3. Day 4 was spent making it look nice. And the remaining days were spent tuning the design (not the gameplay) to make it more understandable. Probably 1/3 of that time was spent on the "contract widget" on the bottom left of the screen. This was time well spent but it took away from playing the game and tuning the scoring.

In the end this showed through in the comments, where I should have reduced the dice score considerably.

Anyway I learned a lot from developing this one. Generators are awesome for building highly stateful systems!

Thanks to all and congrats to everyone on the excellent games.