Would have like to post more diary entries during development, but everything was a bit full on, and couldn't spare the time until now. To be honest, we were a bit stumped by this theme: I really didn't think it was going to get in with such other cool themes as "Sheer bloody panic" and "Is it poison?" ... how could these not get voted in? :) Day 1 was frantic brainstorming for game concept and story. Day 2-3 brainstorming game mechanics revolving around platform puzzle elements (Lucid came up with most of these ideas!), starting to code these up. Core game artwork was basically finished by Day 4-5 and integrated with a working game engine by Day 5. Day 6 spend getting cut scene and title screen classes working, finalising artwork for these.

As during last year of the competition, there was an epic, frantic race to the finish. All of the story elements, cut scene flow and basically all of the level design happened in the last 12 hours. I think we are basically happy with what we have produced: there was some cool artwork that just didn't get time to be implemented in :( and I think we could have done much better with the level design given an extra day! ... you'd think I'd learn: ran into the exact same problem last competition, trying to code up puzzles in the last 12 hours at about 4am.

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!