“Of Robots & Groglots”, Post-Mortem
Posted by jlnr
What worked well:
- Building a good infrastructure: Clean object system & usable level editor = worth a lot. I only really started building levels around the 40 hour mark, and that worked like a charm.
- Cutting stuff in the end: Music wouldn’t have helped me a lot. Not having an ending was smart too: Everyone who noticed that must have liked the game anyway
- Ruby, together with an ad-hoc autoloading mechanism, made for one of the smoothest coding experiences ever.
- TIME MACHINE! I knew I’d need a backup system sooner or later (turned out to be true), but I really didn’t feel like bothering with Subversion because I always forget to add files etc. and it wastes time, so I just watched Time Machine do its background work every hour. Boy was that a relief.
- Periscope: While my timelapse wasn’t highly interesting, it only took two clicks to create, so no time wasted here for a low score
What didn’t really work:
- People had various problems with the gameplay (controls, motion sickness, …), and even if I knew that earlier, I probably could not have done much about it except getting into a panic.
- Needed to do more optimizing than I usually do, and some levels are still slow. Will revisit this and try to improve on this from the Gosu library’s side.
- I had a cold that made thinking pretty hard. Anything that involved maths was buggy, which caused a minor panic just before the deadline. It also made IRC very hard to follow
Next time’s plan: Keep the solid workflow, hope that the game concept works out better with regards to the Fun, and consequently Overall category, try to be more experimental technically. Can’t wait 
Also, did anyone play the game with a gamepad? Would be cool to know for the next time, because it was hard to decide between a small ending screen and gamepad support in the last few minutes Thanks!
Tags: gosu, post-mortem, ruby
May 5th, 2008 at 5:27 am
Since you asked, yes- I used a game pad on your game.