So, I have done past game jams, and I have found that having plans made in advance helps. A lot. Because my game idea was pretty well-defined, this helped me set goals easily. However, if there was any issue this game jam, it was being led astray.
My Original Goal:
-Darwin X Dominion: Players design AIs for Dominion, which can face of against one another in simulations, be ranked after hundreds of plays, set up a database for this, etc, etc. And Maybe I will add a feature to allow humans to play against the AI.
-What actually happened: After getting most of the basic infrastructure of the game of Dominion done in a day or two, A LOT of effort had to be put into making the UI elements, and I approached such things ad-hoc, as I kind of forgot that they would be things I would want.
So, things to learn for the future:
-User Input is something that needs to be handled, and the best solutions are less adhoc. I will try to abstract buttons if I am going to have to implement them again in a codeheart game. Also, the fact that I left the UI for AI development until after I designed the JSON representation of AI led me to have 3 different AI representations that need to be transformed between (one that maps to the GUI AI maker, one that can be output to JSON, and one slightly-different-from-JSON internal game representation)
-The failure to add the other features isn't much of an issue, as I think I will work on them in the future: I knew all along that scaling the game would be a bit rough, but that can come later.
So, development time went something like this:
1 Day: bare basics Dominion rules w/o user input
1 Day: bare basics UI
1 Day: bare basics AI
3 Days: Adding extra features like cards with player decisions and a game log, that probably should have been accounted for in the beginning / thought about how they would interact with humans
1 Day: allowing players to design their own AIs, having an interface for this, having a format that could be saved out / uploaded if I added the feature quickly, etc, etc
I think the main issue was that after I capped off what I saw as the "99% done with basics, the next part will be easy..." I really underestimated that last 1%, which can be really hard. (Implementing Mine took like half a day, I think).
So, that was this game, which, though I do plan on putting more work into it, probably not for the next game jam.
So, the next game jam:
Remember when I said above that the thing most useful in a game jam is to have a game plan? Well...that's kind of an issue, as I have a bunch of half-baked ideas for the next game jam.
Idea 1: A simple infinite tower jumping platformer (as a means of learning Box 2D, seems like some cool stuff can be done with that that I saw this jam)
Idea 2: Fire Emblem X Pokemon - main issue with this idea: It might not even be quarter-baked
Idea 3: Extend my current Dominion game - I am going to do this at some point, so who knows
I like the idea of sticking with codeheart: now that I am in the midst of using it a lot, it seems like a good idea to continue. Now for analysis of these ideas:
Idea 1:
This would be likely the most educational for me, as learning my way around Box2D would be helpful for the future. However, such a game might be almost too simple to make in the allotted time, though also maybe this could therefore be the one game that I could make in a game jam and even polish with images. But yeah, physics might be a cool thing.
Idea 2:
This has the issue of being far larger than game-jam scale. However, it would also bring in a lot of nice things. Among these are that I would learn from Tony how he did tile-based maps, which is definitely a neat skill for making pretty games. Also, I would need to spend a decent amount of time thinking exactly where I want to go with this, which might be just a little hard. It also might infringe on a million copyrights, but heck, I made Dominion for the last game jam. If I went this route, one of the hardest things would probably be thinking of the proper subset of the game that could be made within the time of a game jam, as I couldn't implement 20+ maps, a storyline, all the mechanics, yada, yada, yada, but still designing this subset in a way such that it could be extended fairly well. This would be totally cool I think, as it would be an attempt at in some way combining my favorite games (long story short would be Fire Emblem but with Pokemon-esque mechanics of leveling / move aquisition). It's also notably the one that I have written about the most here, so hmm...maybe
Idea 3:
This would be easy and fun, but I don't feel like it would be enough in the spirit of a game jam, as at this point I feel my Dominion game needs more polish and addition of tiny features rather than true extension, unless I tried to implement a whole expansion of Dominion in addition to the base set, but man, that would be hard (even just thinking about Library makes me worried, so what about other sets?).
So, in sum, I may be trying to make a prototype Fire Emblem X Pokemon game for the next game jam, as I feel as though Idea 1 lacks a clear enough vision for me to do well with it, and Idea 3 is a bit unjammy, even though I could certainly spend many game jams trying to implement all of Dominion and subtle additional features to the AI system.
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