Another challenge over. Mood: foiled again!

mangobrain on 2007/04/10 00:31 of Super Spelunker

At some point in the distant future, I will have to actually finish a game within the week.

For the first challenge, I bit off a bit more than I could chew, and feel that I did quite well under the circumstances: using a programming language I wasn't familiar with; making the decision to go 3D despite having previously never done much more than the odd rotating cube where OpenGL was concerned. I made something playable within the week, but it wasn't polished, and had a couple of reasonably major flaws given the game type - both aiming and collision detection were awful at high speeds, which is kinda fundamental for a high speed shooting game. How I placed second in the individuals is beyond me.

For the second challenge, I stuck with a 2D game and no dependencies beyond PyGame, but actually managed to do considerably worse in my opinion. In retrospect I should have been less strict in my determination to do everything myself; using an existing isometric map engine might have saved a lot of time. I ended up backtracking a lot and spending so much time getting something working at all that I never had time to make it actually feel like a game. To be honest, I'm surprised I placed only one lower than in the first challenge.

This time round, I think I did OK. I kept my expectations low at first: 2D game, non isometric, screen-by-screen progression instead of scrolling landscape, heavy use of randomisation instead of having to design levels. My use of PyGame was better, in the sense that I actually made proper use of SpriteGroups and the built-in collision tests instead of rolling my own. The biggest issue I faced was circumstances; specifically, the fact that I wasn't going to be anywhere near a computer on the last 2 days. Fortunately it only ended up being the last day, but by then my expectations had grown and my time hadn't all been spent productively.

It's really disappointing to know that I've uploaded something that isn't polished. One more day would have meant the third boss was implemented, even if not as elaborately as intended (the second boss is already more basic than originally imagined); sound could have been added; high scores might have appeared, and saved games if I really pushed myself, but probably not. There's code in there to disable various bits of the game logic, intending to have a more pure maze game as a second game mode, but I never had time to test it so it wasn't made accessible from the starting screen. The ship would REALLY benefit from some kind of graphical effect on the thrusters, since at the moment it just drifts around on what might as well be a strong breeze.

The fact of the matter is, I haven't actually played a Super Spelunker game to completion. If you go through the trouble of getting all three keys and the artifact, then get to the last room, for all I know the game crashes. Even if it works, all you'll get is some lame "congratulations" screen knocked up in all of 2 minutes. The maze size has been picked with little thought. I also have a sneaking suspicion that I might not have completely squashed the bug which leads one or more of the keycards sometimes not actually being on the map. The game description also mentions puzzles: I won't even go into what I had planned at one point, because I was living in cloud cuckoo land thinking it was possible during a working week.

On the plus side, the explosion graphics don't suck as much as I thought they would after I originally drew them. The bosses blow up in a very satisfying retro style, and to a large extent I did actually make the game I wanted to make in terms of look and feel, excepting some tweaking of difficulty levels. Ship control is dead on, and I like the way it bounces (and the fact that I haven't been able to make it get stuck inside any walls; very important!).

In summary, I feel happier than at the end of the second challenge, but something about the feel of what I ended up with has me thinking that I won't place as highly. After the second challenge, I was so disheartened that I didn't enter the third (even after placing third in the individuals - I'm such a perfectionist). This time I'm looking forward to doing it again, but only if I can have the whole week. :)

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Comments

saluk on 2007/04/10 01:55:

You made a much better game than previous contests, it seems quite polished, from my perspective, and I suspect you'll place fairly high. I haven't played to completion because its really hard, hopefully those that do run into the bugs later will vote for the game they played until it starts getting buggy :) You should feel successful at how much you were able to do, I know I'm pretty proud of what I managed to eke out - even though century of the fruit-bat's entry is only about 20% of what we had planned to do.

Super spelunker is good enough it needs to have some post compo releases, so you have all the time in the world to mold it into the perfect game you want to make :)

Tee on 2007/04/10 02:07:

I haven't finished your game (it's a bit hard for me), but I think you did great. I like the look and feel as well. On this competition though it will be harder to score because there are many entries, and many very good entries this time. Anyway, I hope you have the whole week next time. :)

saluk on 2007/04/10 04:03:

Thanks for the kind words. I think both of our games are a bit on the hardcore side, especially when people are playing through so many games at once. I haven't finished yours either, but I plan to. It's going to be interesting to see the outcome, there is a much larger pool of games but also a larger pool of voters. Not to mention that the good to bad ratio seems really high as well. I have some idea of what the top games will be, but I'm not sure the order. I don't want to talk about it too much though and possibly influence voting...

Tee on 2007/04/10 15:52:

saluk: Sorry for the confusion, but my comment was directed at mangobrain, you posted just a few minutes before me. Yours is still in my to-play list. :) I'll let you know (probably in the ratings comments) when I play it. Although I haven't played it yet, I like the idea of your game.

saluk on 2007/04/10 18:29:

Whoops, no problem, I actually thought you were mangobrain, heh. Super spelunker rocks! I haven't tried your game either...

mangobrain on 2007/04/11 00:33:

Thankyou both for the compliments :) Now that I've had time to play through my game in the state it was uploaded, I do agree it's hard to finish, but I doubt it's impossible (once you apply the bugfix mentioned in one of my other diary entries). Even though there is no boss for the red keycard or the artifact, you can still collect them; in the case of the red keycard, you'll appear in what looks like a boss room, but just be given the item straight away. Similarly, for the artifact, you just have to enter the room. My main disappointment now is the sheer suckiness of the game complete screen for anyone who plays to the end - apart from the known bug, that is ;)

Tee on 2007/04/11 22:31:

Well, not many Pyweek games have nice winning screens anyway. Most of them are just a message or a picture or something simple like that. In my opinion, considering we only have a week, what really counts is the game, not the ending. It's worth more to spend time enhancing the game rather than the ending. After all, if the player isn't motivated or having enough fun to get to the ending, he's never going to see it. :)

richard on 2007/04/12 00:06:

Hey, our winning screen is cool, with music and all :)

pekuja on 2007/04/12 01:18:

I really liked TrainTris, although it did have some flaws... Did you work on it after PyWeek at all? Anyways, your new game looks nice too, although I haven't played it much yet. From what I played (got to the first boss), it seems like it could be very cool, but there just doesn't seem to be enough content for the large gameworld. If there was fun stuff to do like solving puzzles or defeating challenging enemies in all or most of the screens, this would be an awesome game. The visuals are very nice.

mangobrain on 2007/04/12 13:13:

No, I haven't worked on TrainTris at all.. although I do have some vague plans to resurrect it in the future, if only because the idea was so novel. I have a lot of vague plans though. There's actually a lot of potential in the design, and even in the code written during PyWeek, that couldn't possibly be exploited during the week. ;) Accelerator got a few bugfixes post-compo and does in fact have a SourceForge project, but it's nowhere near what I would like it to become.

I agree about the lack of content compared to the maze size. When I originally wrote the maze generation, I played with much larger mazes; then when I needed to test things like the bosses, I played with smaller mazes (10x10 grid) to make it easy to get to the relevant parts of the game... the current size was intended as a compromise, but is possibly too large for the game in its current state. Open to debate, I suppose, but the bottom line is that a "finished" version would have more to do in some form (or maze size options, or similar).

Given the time I spent playtesting, which could have perhaps been spent on features, I was very disappointed to find a bug in the uploaded version.