Post-Mortem: My trip to the Grid

Hello.

Now that my game is finished and people actually started playing it, I am impressed as to how well it actually turned out to be.

I started the game with a much more outlandish idea of implementation. I was thinking of using a huge array to store everything, and have trackers, and it turns out I never needed all the absurdly complex ideas that I thought I would need.

I am incredibly impressed that I actually succeeded in making the items work and having this be a completely functional game. This is likely due to me switching my game plan the first day I came to the lab, after talking to Mike about implementation ideas. Instead of having a super complex array, I had many objects and interactions of those objects with the world.

In the end, I was able to fix most of the things that went wrong in the game, but 5 out of 100 games there will be that one time where a line will be crossed by a player and I still have no idea why. Probably because frame calculations and speed. Driving players and making them collide with themselves and items was the hardest part of my game, and also the one that I spent the most time on.

The biggest surprise to me was how easy it was to implement the items. Making them spawn and making players able to hit them was mildly challenging, but making an item interact with the world wasn't. And I was very surprised by that, since I expected item interactions to be the hardest part of the implementation.

My time breakdown is very simple:
1st day: spawn map and players
2nd day: make them move
3rd day: make them move the tron way
4th day: make light trails
5th day: make them crash into things
6th day: fix final crash issues and implement items.

I would change the way my players work. I would instead have an array that stores valid players and make an object of that array so that there would be no player specific code, meaning that I could theoretically have as many players as I could fit in the array, leading to possibly a more than 2 player tron game.


Next Time:

The Williams College Dating Sim!

My game will be a dating Sim that initially will feature Mia, Sam and myself as the datable characters. You will follow Williams College relationship/dating traditions and will have to tailor your strategy to fit which person you want to court. There will also be some cameo appearances from our other friends. This will theoretically take place during winter study.

I believe this game should be very feasible, since my Creating Games midterm project was also a text-based decision-making game, meaning that it shouldn't be that hard to implement a very similar game. I can simplify it by making it less long if necessary and reducing the amount of npcs and maybe not having items, but that can be decided after I start the game.

The first day should be the setting up of the basic layout of the game. I should be able to make a function that when given the appropriate variables, will spawn the screen of the game. The second day should be dedicates to begin filling out certain variables in order to allow for testing to commence. The third day should be implementing user input, in which I will have to decide if I want to use the keyboard or the mouse as the means of input. During the fourth day I should finish filling out the necessary text, images and background that will be necessary for my game. On the fifth day I will do screen stringing, which should be a series of if statements that determine which screen follows what screen based on the user's decision. If everything goes according to plan, I will have two more days to implement items and other characters in the game. In case things don't go according to my plan, I will have two whole days dedicated to debugging and finishing whatever is left.

I am most worried about stringing all the screens correctly and perhaps overcomplicating things. I am also worried about images and making sure that my dating sim corresponds to my expectations. I am a bit of a perfectionist, and I have a hard time accepting that sometimes the product of my work will be different than the product of my imagination.

So far this has been a very fun class and I hope the second half will be just as fun.

Toodles!
-Rinna.