Finally I found some time to make a post-mortem for “Watercolor Wheel Evolution“:

What went well:

• Letting my daughter with her now 3 years doing the art. She did incredibly well, had fun doing this (as every time she can make some watercolor pictures), and was really impressed with the result in the game. Seeing her self painted creatures move along the screen put a really big smile on her face. Is there a better way to give your child some insight into your game-making hobby?

My daughter at work doing the game sprites.

• Being in the jam – not only due to the teamwork but to have this extra day. This is quite valuable with wife and two children at home.
• Fixing late bugs. Wow, it is quite scary everytime what strange bugs will appear if your game is almost finished and the deadline approaching. But I could fix them.
• Noticing the progress I’ve made since my first LD one year ago. This is one of the greatest aspects of this time restricted jams. You really get a hang on efficient techniques for creating and developing and also improve in code structuring even if it’s still quite a mess compared with a project in a more extended time frame. The sound/music recording, which cost me some time last LD, was merely a routine this time.

Like last LD: totally professional recording equipment.

What went wrong:

• The game mechanics. I totally missed the point with giving the player a good incentive doing the things the player should do to make the mechanics work. I don’t know if that was due to lack of testing the game or a misconception of the whole mechanics.
• Social (real) life. My wife fled with the children on sunday noon as I was too much into game development. Returned in the evening .

So if you like to, you can play and rate here.

The result.

The family team’s project is done. Almost all of the arts is by my little daughter (almost 3). She also had some impact on the strange name of the game .

Try and rate!

So this is the current progress of my game. All the arts is by my daughter, who will become 3 next week, except the player circle. She refused to try drawing a circle even if she’d done before with the yellow one. *sigh*

Looks like a fish tank.

Some of the stuff swirling around should be collected by the player, some should be avoided. What you collect in a given time will decide your next stage, which resembles evolution into the next generation.

Just a picture from yesterday on which the lead artist of our team (my daughter) is creating the game sprites.

This will become one of the “bad guys”.

I’m in this weekend. Due to the fact, that my wife and my children are swirling around, I’ll do it differently than planned. I’m going to enter the jam with my older daughter, who will become 3 next week, as my teammate. She would like to do some painted arts for the game and probably will also give me some game design advice (like “pa, this game needs more pirates”). Here is a reference how the art style could look like:

That game will probably become quite unique. At least visually.

My tools:

• python with pygame
• paper, watercolor and pencil or felt pen
• scanner
• gimp
• audacity + acoustic guitar OR
• musagi

As promised, here comes the first post-compo version of my LD 23 game Bottlecolonies. I evaluated a lot of the feedback you gave me on my LD entry and tried to improve the game with different additions and changes. If you click the link below, you can see that this is just the first beta version for the finalized game. At the moment there is only the windows executable. I’m working on a Linux port but have to try out if the subfolder works first. The changes from the LD version so far:

Link to post compo webpage

• Add: +1 bonus point if a building is placed next to any park
• Change: -6 point for discarding a tile
• Add: second music track
• Add: new map, selectable as level 3. The old level 3 is hidden behind level 2. If you beat level 2 you automatically will play the old level 3 next.
• Change: goal scores for prosperous colonies changed for new bonus points
• Change: subfolder for assets
• Add: elliptic marker where next tile will be placed

Further updates will include:

• More maps
• At least one more music track
• Additional buildings for the end game to make the game more interesting
• Saved highscore per level

Even if you have played it before, you should try it out again. The changes in the score system have a big impact on available strategies. In case you haven’t rated the original version yet, you can find it here.

And last a screenshot of the new map: