The Wizard's Data: post-mortem

mit-mit on 2015/08/30 23:55 of Team Chimera

Everyone else is doing it, so I will too :) (try to keep it brief) First of all congratulations to the winners of both the individual and team entries: these were both really top notch games, well deserving. As for Wizard's Data, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. It was super cool to have a dedicated artist working on the game and to work on a team entry this competition. I'm pretty happy with the feedback we got; there really wasn't any really negative criticism and I'm most happy that we got 0% DNW. What I learnt from this competition: (1) Collision Detection/Management: Actually it wasn't so much collision detection that was a problem, more collision management. I went into the game thinking "how hard can this really be? I don't need to read about how to do this, I'll just do it ...". The game had a reasonable amount of collision management bugs (we got a nice award for it :) ), so before next competition I'm going to devote time to getting a better way of dealing with this aspect of games in a more principled way. (2) Time Management: I think I read in a past diary entry by Cosmologicon that his recipe for pyweek timing was 1/3 on developing the core game and 2/3 on polishing: I think I'm really going to try this genuinely next pyweek. We really didn't have a working game until day 5/6, and (unfortunately for me) I was quite sick on day 6/7, and became pretty unproductive here, so the race to the finish was spent finishing the game rather than polishing. I felt we had quite a few rough corners. If you have read this far, then congratulations to everyone who participated this comp; there were a lot of really great entries. I'm so glad this competition runs; this was super fun for me and obviously I don't do game development for a living so it's awesome to have an outlet to do this, and people who share a passion for games and are willing to give detailed feedback. Thanks to everyone who played and participated!

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Comments

cyhawk on 2015/09/01 08:36:

I've written a few platform games before realizing I'd never get collision detection right :). That said, I haven't seen any bugs in The Wizard's Data. I'm not usually a fan, but in this game the pixel art was excellent. Nice palette!

mit-mit on 2015/09/01 11:35:

ha ha, maybe this is what I will learn after making a few more games too :) Artwork all thanks to Lucid.