Post-Mortem
OrionDark7 on 2018/11/12 15:50
of OrionDark7
I'm now going to try to respond to all of the individual comments I got, mostly just for self reference on what I did really well on and what I could improve.
larry
You control traffic lights at intersections by clicking on them with your mouse and toggling them from red to green. Clear crashes by right-clicking on crashed cars. That's the game! The game ran great, and it was clear from moment to moment what was going on. Not exactly my kind of game; it ultimately kind of devolves into a game of simply having quick & accurate mouse movement.
Tip for getting the game to run on Linux, and maybe Mac too: go into the "sfx" directory and copy all the uppercase sound effect files to their lowercase equivalents. For example, copy "Horn.wav" to "horn.wav".
I agree that you had to have very precise and fast mouse movement, at least for some of the harder levels. I did get a couple of comments about the "Horn.wav" problem for Linux. Linux was the one platform I did not test my game on (Probably should have, because that's what most of you are using). One easy way I could do that is by checking all the caps and non-caps on file names. Thank you for the feedback.
Tee
It's visible the amount of work you put into this; it looks very complete. I appreciate all the different modes and levels and that's not easy to pull off in one week. I admit that this style of gameplay (multitasking-type games) doesn't appeal to me in particular too much, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. It's nicely executed and well polished overall.
I agree with the statement that making levels and different modes is not easy to pull off in a week, but not for this game. For the past two Pyweeks I competed in I did have a lot of trouble with this as you had so many objects that make up one level, and you have to design the level very well. For Road Rage there were not as many objects in one level, all you really needed to figure out is how many makes the balance between not too easy and not too hard to make the level go smooth. The only thing that really took time was testing the levels to see if they were too hard or too easy and then constantly adjusting them to get them to an equilibrium. Thanks for the positive feedback. :)
Cosmologicon
I feel like I've played pretty similar games before, but this is very well done. Good job making a lot of different levels with a good progression of difficulty out of just a couple simple mechanics. The half-controlled intersections - in particular Level 8 - felt just a bit unfair whenever I had to decide whether to let a bus through with no way of knowing whether it would make it in time. (Some sort of indicator at each edge of how long until the next car appeared is one possible fix.) But for the most part, I liked the challenges.
Half-Controlled intersections were really supposed to make you make decisions on wether you wanted to risk a crash or make people mad. The decisions probably varied from Level to Level (like when you went from trying to avoid crashes to trying to avoid angry drivers). I agree that these were very challenging and a little unfair, which is why I tried to put them only on harder levels. I like your idea of putting indicators on the edge specifying when the next car would come, and I'll probably do that in a Post-Mortem. Thank you for the feedback!
DR0ID
nice game, 3 game modes (I haven't tried them all)
Thanks for the positive feedback!
yarolig
Well made!
Road crossings without lights are disaster.
That's what they were supposed to be, >:). Thanks for the positive feedback.
cauch
Nice game.
I'm not sure the system to punish letting on way being always red is well balanced or even work: in survival, the time still increases for ages.
Also, when one line is without control and a bus is coming on a perpendicular line, I have the feeling the chance of success are just random: it depends if you are lucky and no new car appears on the line without control, as they go faster than the bus.
The car/bus can also appear and disappear outside of the screen, so they just not pop out of thin air.
I had fun playing around and I appreciated the existence of a menu, of options and of different levels and different mode.
About the system on punishing for keeping to many people on red, that was just a very bad attempt at an anti-cheat system. I didn't want people to cheat through the game by leaving every light on red, leaving the game on for a long period of time, and then come back and win every level. I agree with your point that system was unfairly balanced and I probably should've messed with it from level to make it more fair.
Another comment about the half-controlled intersections, success doesn't really depend on if cars and buses go, you kind of just had to make a decision on wether a line of cars would make it in time or if you needed them to stay put. Thanks for the feedback!
saluk
Great job! I rage quit around level 8 or 9 because I got irritated with the hitboxes on the cars. I feel like once they are half or more across the opposing light they should continue even if you change the light to red. But they are stopping even if they are a little PAST the light. Numerous cases of having a crash because the last car in a line stopped moving when I felt like changing the light was the right move got very frustrating.
The cars stopping past the light was a "feature" if you know what I mean. I understand that stuff like that doesn't happen in real life and it keeps going, but the way I had the system for Traffic Lights set up that didn't happen. I only kept it in because I felt like if cars kept going then there would be less possibility of having a crash and I didn't really want to make it too easy. Thanks for the feedback.
mit-mit
Game was pretty fun: very similar to another entry this comp. I think this game did a bit better job than the other in the more steady progression of levels, and the use of the time limit and other objectives: made for a more challenging and interesting experience. Also nice to see the tutorial and other support information in the game.
Thanks for the positive feedback! I spent a some time trying to get the levels to have steady progression as well as have them playable. I put the Tutorial and more detailed support information into the game because of people getting really confused on my past PyWeek and Ludum Dare projects, so that was something very well needed.
ntoll
I really enjoyed playing this game. It's a great puzzler / coordination problem. Nice and simple yet effective..!
Thanks for the positive feedback!
speedlimit35
very nice feel, lag between levels. how to package? its so hard???!
When you say lag between levels do you mean the loading and intro screen? I don't see why you would need to package unless you were on Linux, because that's the only distro I didn't make. When you say it's hard do you mean the game is hard or are you continuing your previous statement of how to package it? Nevertheless, thank you for the feedback.
Unicorn Markets
Reminded me of the NetLogo traffic simulation. Although, unfortunately I didn't find it very fun. Screens took a while to load and the flow seemed like it hadn't been tested enough.
I probably shouldn't have added a loading screen. Nowhere on the screen does it say it's loading and it's really just annoying. I did spend a little time testing levels but I agree and I probably should've tested them a little more. Thanks for feedback!
mauve
The cars are cute; I especially liked it when darkness fell and they turned on their headlights. The horn sounds really add to the urgency.
It's a difficult game! I kept messing up and causing pile ups. I found that when you cause a crash it's hard to unpick it without causing loads more crashes.
I agree that it's pretty difficult to clear crashes without causing more. Usually I would've just turned all the lights red until it was all clear, but I understand that you didn't have that much time to do that in all the levels. Thanks for the positive feedback!
coen
Nice idea - elegant
One small glitch: On Linux I had to rename Horn.wav to horn.wav to get it to work (files taken from the repo)
Yeah I should've caught the Linux glitch. At least I didn't get any DNWs for it. Thanks for the feedback!
rdb
Creative application of the theme, and overall fairly well-polished game (though some music and less jarring bleep sounds would have been nice). The clickboxes were a bit confusing at first and I opened traffic in both directions by accident more than once (but part of that is probably that it was a tiny window on my high-DPI display). It was fun to play around with for a while, but it feels like the core gameplay might need to be extended with a bit more for it to be even more fun.
For some reason I always forget about music until the last minute and then I forget to add it. I probably should've edited the horn sound to be a little less sudden and less aggressive. I agree with the statement that the clickboxes were confusing, I couldn't find a really good way to do it, you probably could've made it fullscreen to make it easier to see and click, but I still could improve that. I tried to add 3 different modes to extend the gameplay a little bit, but I probably could've done a couple of more levels. Thanks for the feedback!
arifsch
Nice traffic simulation. Very intuitive controls for switching the traffic lights. It's quite fun to optimize the traffic flow.
Thanks for the positive feedback!
asrp
Has the filename case sensitivity issue where the filename in the source doesn't match the case of the actual filename.
pygame.error: Unable to open file './sfx/horn.wav'
Good execution. I'm not too sure how to beat the later levels though. The different light conditions was a nice touch.
I probably should test Linux next time. Later levels required a bit of thinking and decision making. Thanks for the positive feedback!
wezu
Simple concept, good execution, fun to play - occasionally all lights turn green on a junction at the same time, not sure if that's my missclick, a feature or a bug.
Opening all of the traffic was a probably a miss click, oddly a feature, and unfortunately a bug. Either way, thanks for the positive feedback.
chrisyan2000
The game was fun and provided quite a few game modes. However the controls are a little too uncomfortable, it would be great if you can use the numpad as shortcut keys for the traffic lights. I didn't see much creativity in this game as traffic flow appears to be one of the most common theme here. The production is fine, the background music and certain strange animations are a little disturbing.
I really like the idea of using the numpad as shortcut keys, except that my keyboard doesn't have a numpad to test on. I don't understand what you mean by strange animations, unless it's the one where cars start and stop repetitively behind a bus, then I understand. Thank you for the feedback!
Road Rage's success outside of PyWeek
Some of you might know that Road Rage has an itch.io page. After posting it around the internet for a bit, it gained a lot of popularity. As of today, Road Rage has 230+ views and 190+ downloads on itch.io. On October 29th it was the most popular game made with pygame on itch.io, and even made the list of New and Popular games for a brief period of time. I'm very happy with the results that I got from it as well as the results I got from here.
Yet again I'm really happy that I get to compete in PyWeek, it is both fun and challenging and every time I learn ways I can improve. Thanks for a great PyWeek, and I'll see you all in 6 months.