{"id":34,"date":"2008-01-17T21:35:50","date_gmt":"2008-01-17T10:35:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vectorstorm.org\/2008\/01\/17\/petition-damsel-post-mortem\/"},"modified":"2008-02-15T20:22:09","modified_gmt":"2008-02-15T09:22:09","slug":"petition-damsel-post-mortem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/2008\/01\/17\/petition-damsel-post-mortem\/","title":{"rendered":"Petition Damsel Post-Mortem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So it&#8217;s been a couple days since I finished Petition Damsel and posted it on the site (For the few folks who have been having troubles with the Win32 binary package;  I&#8217;m pretty sure that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vectorstorm.org\/get-games\/game-in-a-week\/petition-damsel\/\">version 1.0.1.1<\/a> has finally fixed the &#8220;incorrect configuration&#8221; problem).<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve had some time away from Damsel, I&#8217;ve played partway through <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telltalegames.com\/samandmax\">Moai Better Blues<\/a>, and a little of <a href=\"http:\/\/kayin.pyoko.org\/iwbtg\/\">I Wanna Be the Guy<\/a> (I&#8217;ve made it about two thirds of the way through the second screen;  took me well over an hour!), and so at this point, I think I&#8217;m far enough away from the whole experience that I can begin to evaluate how it went.<\/p>\n<p>So without further ado:<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>What went right<\/strong> <\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Using VectorStorm:<\/strong>  With VectorStorm as a basis for the project, I could really jump right in and implement game concepts very quickly.  It gave me support for changing screen resolutions, visual quality, volume levels, and all sorts of other &#8220;Quality of Life&#8221; stuff that I never would have had time to implement within the week, if I had started from scratch.  It also meant that I could blatantly rip off code that I&#8217;d already written, such as the UI that I wrote for my &#8216;Asteroids&#8217; clone in VectorStorm.<\/li>\n<li><strong>No code Monday&amp;Tuesday:<\/strong>  Restricting myself from doing any coding on Monday and Tuesday meant that I could really focus on getting the design right, rather than risk coding myself into a dead end.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Good quality music:<\/strong>  I love <a href=\"http:\/\/www.magnatune.com\/\">Magnatune<\/a>.  Seems like whenever I need music for a project, I can find exactly what I need there.  In this case, the new album from <a href=\"http:\/\/magnatune.com\/artists\/ehren\">Ehren Starks<\/a> had exactly the moody piano music I wanted for the introductory quote reveal.  Finding a suitably manic piece to move into was much harder, until I happened to bump into a piece by <a href=\"http:\/\/magnatune.com\/artists\/blownaparts\">the Napolean Blown Aparts<\/a> which I&#8217;d heard a year or two back, and which turned out to be just what I needed.  I&#8217;ve bought an awful lot of music from Magnatune over the years, and their licensing allows me to use their music in noncommercial projects. So in my book, they rock.  :)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong><em>What went wrong<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Using VectorStorm:<\/strong>  I don&#8217;t know that VectorStorm was really the right choice for this type of game.  Vector graphics have a kind of old-school cred, but they also tend to feel a little serious, where I was trying for a more lighthearted, slightly madcap feeling for this game, and I feel like the vector graphics took away from that.<\/li>\n<li><strong>No code Monday&amp;Tuesday:<\/strong>  In practice, the best parts of the design only occurred to me after I started implementing the game;  they were triggered by actually playing the game.  Having the playable version actually helped the design process.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Difficulty of creating sprites:<\/strong> I hadn&#8217;t run into this before because I had never created a vector sprite more complicated than the ship from &#8216;Asteroids&#8217;, but it&#8217;s actually really difficult to create vector sprites as complicated as the Petition Damsel for the VectorStorm library; I basically had to draw them freehand on graph paper, and then transcribe points manually. Next time I do something like this, I want to have a vector sprite editor tool which will let me design these objects interactively.<\/li>\n<li><strong>First playable very late:<\/strong>  My &#8220;first playable&#8221; version of Damsel wasn&#8217;t ready until Sunday morning;  only about twelve hours from the final deadline.  I really should have had that on Thursday, so that I&#8217;d have had time to tune the gameplay, instead of having to release whatever I happened to implement in the final hours of Sunday, with no time to experiment with variations.  Next time, perhaps I&#8217;ll start coding on Tuesday, and hopefully have a first playable much earlier.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Overambitious design:<\/strong>  The design I had at the end of the design period was far, far beyond what I could actually realistically achieve within the remainder of the week, and was radically cut down at the last minute on Sunday.  In the future, I need to generate far simpler designs from the outset!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So there we go.  All told, I&#8217;m extremely pleased (and was rather shocked) at how well Damsel turned out, bearing in mind all the troubles I ran into along the way.  It literally came together during during the last nine hours of the week-long deadline, as I was trying to write out all the bits of design that I simply didn&#8217;t have time to implement.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m going to address a bunch of these issues before or during the next &#8216;Game in a Week&#8217;.  I&#8217;m currently hoping to start the next one in a couple weeks.   Gives me some time to write that vector sprite editor, first. :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So it&#8217;s been a couple days since I finished Petition Damsel and posted it on the site (For the few folks who have been having troubles with the Win32 binary package; I&#8217;m pretty sure that version 1.0.1.1 has finally fixed the &#8220;incorrect configuration&#8221; problem). I&#8217;ve had some time away from Damsel, I&#8217;ve played partway through&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po9WK-y","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2817,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions\/2817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}