Post Natum (not Mortem - too much left to do)

ServalKatze on 2007/04/18 09:08 of The Villainy of Cat Food Inc. [by Team zahmeKatzen]

Ok, I've rated most of the games now (many of them are really great!), so I guess I should start writing my "final" statement about how much went right/wrong for us/me in Pyweek4. My team-mate Zahmekoses wrote much more comments than me, so I may write a lot of pointless stuff here just to catch up.. Yaddayadda..

Some first-timer's memories:
Day 1: The theme is announced! We are highly motivated. I have little idea how to put our game idea into working code, so I go for straightforward, naive solutions that'll be a pain to clean up. I can think about proper solutions later, right?
Zahme has some fun making the 32x32 pixel tiles for the ground, metal crates and wooden crates and more little graphics and wonderful fake-screnshots. We won't finish but we'll have some fun.
(....)
Day 5: Trying to implement something that handles cutscenes but my brain doesn't work. Tired of browsing documentation. Zahme struggles with the cat balloon. Pixels driving him insane. Start screen done. Replacing buttons. Simple code to handle story-images. Ugly crook for outro scene. Watching a funny movie in cinema... feeling a little more human.
Back from cinema. Cleaning up our release (e.g. delete all the things we/I couldn't finish in time). Trying to make a nice package but I always end up with weird packages where things are missing or different. Must get up early tomorrow.. Need.. to.. upload.. file... so.. tired....

...
Um... I guess some other things happened between Day 1 and Day 5, like distracting each other by asking "What are you doing?" or by offering chocolate and "Nyanyaihatepaint!!" and insightful conversations like "Huh???"-"Yeah, I expected that error."-"But it worked yesterday!?" ... And losing the ability to speak and think (at least on my part). All those precious memories..

What went wrong: I didn't prepare and I didn't feel like getting into the Skellington during Pyweek. And I couldn't make a Windows binary because.. uh... I didn't have the time and I didn't prepare. I wasted much time looking for basic information.. I didn't take care to keep a Python 2.4 testing enviroment around. Not to mention some horrible codepieces...
Zahme is unhappy about some of the graphics (I can live with them, but he's the graphics artist). And our game has only 2 levels.
What went right: We made a little game! I honestly didn't believe we'd get that far... it probably worked because Zahme did the graphics so I could concentrate on messing up the code. Btw: Thank you for all your effords and putting your sanity at risk, Zahmekoses! I like your graphics....

So what's left to do?

• make some more levels
• map-editor (would be helpful for building maps)
• clean up the damn code
• make some fancier graphics(?)
• some optimizations (the game doesn't need 100%CPU - nothing happens until you press a key, anyway..)
• change the movement style (like.. with animations and not teleporting from tile to tile)
• real catscenes (not just text)
• put some music in
• some AI tweaks
• probably more stuff I forgot

Since I don't remember how awful day 2, 3 and 4 were, I'll probably take part in the next Pyweek... And I suppose, Zahme will be around, too.... It was fun, wasn't it? Was it not? Was it..?

Until then and thank you all for this Pyweek,
-Serval

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Comments

fydo on 2007/04/19 22:24:

catscenes?
haha, cute. :)

alecu on 2007/04/20 04:36:

I just made it run on python 2.4. You just have delete the empty parens when creating a class. For instance,

class Map():
  ...

in 2.4 must be:

class Map:
  ...

It works perfectly otherwise, so 2.5 is not needed at all. Nice game! Cheers!

ServalKatze on 2007/04/20 09:44:

Heh.. Thanks for the compliments. ;)

Now that I have a clumsy map-editor I'll need to clean up the game code. (sigh)