Age Of Exploration post-mortem
What went well:
- Obviously I got good game idea
- Physics turned out well
- Game mechanic was fun
- Interface turned out to be simple, not buggy, etc. For 12h spent it is weird
What well wrong:
- Failed to make more complex graphics because most I tried made it lag fast
- Made mistake of making game time constrained. Should have been some ind of resource constrained. Thing is that most fun is aiming probe well and exploring planet or even few in one show. Time constraint rather made you shot a lot of average shots instead of aiming really carefully which is bad.
- Probably 1/3 of time spend was spent on things that did not work… Would have been good to spend it more on polishing core mechanics and game aims.
- I added only a mouse-wheel based zoom. That was a mistake as Mac users have problems in Flash with that (tough I head Flash player release on 9 December 2009 should have fixed that, can’t confirm) Also users playing on notebook without mouse had problems too…
What now:
- Well firstly I think I will make one more version of it removing time limit and adding some “probes per planet” limit. Should make it more fun. May be I will try adding a little bit more graphical things.
- As for large game based on idea I think I will but it on hold. Needs a lot of content and thinkering on technical sides of it(there are some). Exploring idea for enemies and war, AI, etc. I have some other game ideas that have less of such complications so for time being I will not make it in to a full game. In time being I welcome anyone to try and make their versions of the idea Just bother to send me a note/mail. Would like to see it and play it
- Need to add alternative to mouse zooming.
Longer version of how it went
Day 1. Well woke up and read the theme. Started brainstorming for ideas and come to two options. First I considered was some top down exploration game based on this my older experiment Alone in the Dark But quickly came to a conclusion that it will be aether boring or too complex(high chances on not finishing) so started to think about second idea.
Second idea. Basically solar system exploration game based on rocket lunching with trajectories. In short idea was to build some model of solar system with planets divided on to regions. First you need to send satellites to find planets and then orbit them to find info on the regions. Then you can send colony ships to colonize some regions. This is that some regions give bonuses and on some it is not possible to land at all. So you also have test probes. They fly in a same way as colony ships but should be something like a lot cheaper. So you lunch those until you are shore you can hit needed region with your colony ships. Of course all ships should have some fuel/distance/view area limitations. Idea seemed very basic and not so hard to make + original at least to some extant + probably fun + easy to extend in myriad of direction adding tech tries, enemies, some defense mechanics, anything
Well all that planing cost me 1-2 hours. I had still 2-3 hours left that day to start making something. Well I set down and made solar system generator with all the rotation and simple graphics in a half of an hour probably. And then hit my first problem. In usual strategies stuff is usually stationary. I mean level and usually buildings are. But in my case everything was always in a move… So I went for following camera target scheme without possibility to wonder with it around but with large zooming. Was not shore it would work well. Also I got stuck here for probably some 2 hours not managing to make proper camera code 
It is simple but probably long week of work had it toll on my brain and I spent probably 2 hours on thing that really should take 15-30 minutes… Well another thing I spent my time on thinking how to make regions on the planets and how to color them. That was really problematic… Did this in a process. Turned out that it was too laggy and would take time making textures. There was another idea for how to make it but my time was up. Spent something like an hour thinking about this problem and trying this radial texturing.
Day 2. Well it was clear that I will not have regions in time so I scraped that part. Added physics, simple probes, collisions. Took me some 3-4 hours. Then got stuck for 2 hours making fog of war… Turned out that adding even very minimalistic effects (smooth transition on a border of fog, separate view area circles for planets and probes so that you can see which sees which etc) was bringing performance to some 10Fps with 30 probes flying Well you can see what I ended up with. Good I can have more then 30 particles without lags there. Haven’t tested how many tough.
Well spent two more hours polishing parameters, adding screens and sounds.
Tags: post-mortem