This weekend I’ve participated for the first time in the GID event. The common task is to create a running game prototype in 24 hours (24 hours pure developement time + naps is allowed, too).
I think it went well considering that this was my first participation but essentially I’ve failed because my game prototype is nowhere near finished. It’s rather at an early proof-of-concept stage instead…
Let me introduce the prototype/game quickly - it has no name yet, so let us look at some screenshots instead:
You see, it’s about a stickman that can move. I’m not going to go into more details yet because the game doesn’t consist of much more right now. If you want to see a more interesting animation though, click here.
For those interested here’s a postmortem.
Postmortem
The first problem arose right when I wanted to start: what should I code?
I’ve come up with a few different ideas the days before the GID started: a Zone66/Baryon remake (space-shooter like), a Prince of Persia remake and/or a platform game in general or a game which was consisted of drawing shapes with the mouse - I’ve played a few very neat games of this kind lately: Chalk and Crayon Physics - and I felt that this was an idea that I’d really love to explore but on the other hand I couldn’t come up with an interesting and original gameplay idea.
Beforehand I’ve prepared a few things for a possible platform game. I really love stickman flash animations (for example the one here) and thus I’ve decided that a stickman would be the perfect protagonist, especially since it certainly is easy to create good-looking animations for him.
Searching around with Google, I’ve also found a very neat tool called Pivot Stickfigure Animator, which allows one to easily create animations for stickfigures and other similar shapes and export them to animated GIFs.
An idea I had Saturday morning was a game in which the stickman is running all the time and you have to do cool moves to avoid obstacles and maybe fight enemies. This should create tension and force the player to always pay attention while rewarding him with neat animations and fun gameplay. The feelings created in the players should be similar to those I felt when playing Prince of Persia: Warrior Within when you’re trying to escape from the time guardian - I really love these parts of the game! - but at first I thought that the idea was not worth pursuing. Later though, Juz from #q3mods proposed the same gameplay idea and I told myself that this can’t be a coincidence and decided to create my prototype based on it.
So I’ve only been able to come up with a good game idea late into Saturday afternoon while the others were already working on their games which is the first thing that went wrong: unsufficient preparation.
The next one was that I concentrated too much on creating art and sadly the results aren’t stunning despite the time I’ve spent on creating the animations. A reason for this could have been my horrible and most terrible art pipeline which looks like this: Pivot Animator -> GIF Constructor -> GIMP -> GIF Constructor -> GIMP -> TGB This couldn’t be automated and every step had to be done by hand.
After about 10 hours of work the game was this far. I’ve also lost quite some time (~2.5h) developing a movement cache system that wasn’t used at all because the game never got far enough to support more complex moves and combos which is another thing that went wrong: wasting time on useless stuff.
It also turned out that although I have already developed a few games in TGB I still didn’t know some systems well enough (mainly collisions and physics) because I’ve never coded a platform game before and I had to use trial&error quite frequently while implementing new features. Which leads to another thing that I could have done better: know your tools beforehand!
And last but not least, now that I’m looking at my end-product, I realize that I haven’t stayed with the simplistic gameplay idea I’ve had in the beginning but instead diverged to a too complex game ; thus last two items on my list of stuff that went wrong are: violation of the KISS (keep it simple, stupid!) principle and feature-creep.
On the other hand there are a few things that went right, too: This is the first time I’ve developed a game using rapid iterative development and it worked surprisingly well: hack a few features into the game first as fast as possible, then clean-up and refactor the code afterwards and repeat. (Normally I’m attempting to write the clean version directly but this takes more planning.)
Moreover I’ve learnt many things about TGB I haven’t known before and I’ve grown even more fond of it as a game development system. And ultimately I’m going to continue development of this game even after the GID’s deadline because I really like my stickfigures.
On other news I’ve finally finished my A-Level exams and it seems that I’ve really rocked them. Tomorrow I’ll be allowed to take a look at the marking and hopefully that will explain why I got such good marks..