I'm surprised the author criticised their artistic ability so much. I found the art style quite endearing and seeing the different graphic styles to emulate different systems was impressive.
Post mortem of my one game a month
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Re: Post mortem of my one game a month
#22Huge props for diving in to a mostly-extinct platform!
I've always wondered what the process was for game programmers on the early PCs and consoles.
Are there any books or documentaries that go into depth about the development process of, for instance, Super Mario Bros? I've only seen stuff targeting "mainstream" audiences that glosses over anything technical.
Re: Post mortem of my one game a month
#23I participated in One Game a Month (1GAM) in 2013. It was an amazing experience, even though I managed to make "only" 5 games. It's astonishing to read that the author had the very same problems I had.
Even when I had a clear vision of what I wanted to make, it was pretty hard to avoid feature creeping. When you hit the 90% completion mark, the TODO list starts to grow so scarily fast that the only way out is to develop/improve focus and the ability to ship things. That's when you level up as a developer :)
1GAM is a great opportunity to learn how to ship things, managing time and scope.
Re: Post mortem of my one game a month
#24Huge props for diving in to a mostly-extinct platform! I've always wondered what the process was for game programmers on the early PCs and consoles. Are there any books or documentaries that go into depth about the development process of, for instance, Super Mario Bros? I've only seen stuff targeting "mainstream" audiences that glosses over anything technical.
NES development is alive and well in the Romhacking community, and although I don't know of any detailed commercial project documentation of the sort you asked about, there are tons of guides out there for NES development in general.
It's pretty intense. You don't even have proper sprites. they had to work with 8x8 pixel tiles and piece them together to create images. There were also pretty severe pallet limitations.
All in all it's very interesting.
Re: Post mortem of my one game a month
#25I very much enjoyed this report, and especially the fact of a significant target of your attention being the ZX Spectrum - this is a true and honest approach to the programming art! :) Its definitely true that even learning older architectures can sharpen your focus and skill, general platform dexterity. You may not use a lot of the Z80 assembly skills elsewhere (but then again; you might), but for sure the bounds of…
OP here!
I found Z80 assembler quite interesting (I had previous experience with Intel 16 and 32 bit), and Z88DK supports inline asm so it wasn't too bad if you can restrict the assembler code to small routines and still do the main bits in C.
Re: Post mortem of my one game a month
#26Creating a game a month is hard enough - impressive to see it completed using many different programming languages and frameworks
Especially considering it was done alongside a job. I wonder how much time he actually had per month to work on it
OP here!
I can't really tell, but I had to be very effective using my free time. Sometimes is 30-45 minutes before going to bed, sometimes is waking up early on weekends.
I don't watch TV, I read only a couple of books this year, etc; always keeping in mind that there's some free time that must be dedicated to your family no matter what.
EDIT: I could check the repositories to get an idea, although that doesn't represent the exact amount of time, could be a good estimate.
Re: Post mortem of my one game a month
#27I'm surprised the author criticised their artistic ability so much. I found the art style quite endearing and seeing the different graphic styles to emulate different systems was impressive.
OP here. Thanks for that!
I'm a little bit better now, but I guess it looks different when you see the end result. Believe me when I tell you the process was quite painful and it involved starting over several times :)
Re: Post mortem of my one game a month
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't seem to imply that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmortem_documentation
I mean, it literally means "after death" and stems from the name for the study of dead bodies, so it seems odd to name any post-facto report a post-mortem and the Wiki article may apply to gaming industry but it's not really common industry usage. Normally in tech, a post-mortem is a particular kind of analysis, backtracking from an incident to figure out what caused it, with the aim of preventing it happening again…
Someone can die, but not have been a failure in life. I've always taken post-mortem blogs to mean "We're not working on this anymore. Here's what we learned during the time we did." The reason for a project ending is often failure, but it doesn't have to be. I've seen several post-mortems about successful projects, they're just not nearly as common as the failures.
Re: Post mortem of my one game a month
#29Grats! This is a great accomplishment. Releasing teaches you 1000% more than just making a demo and not releasing. There's lots of little things you need to do extra. Then you learn from the crits, feedback and reviews of others. Again, well done!
Goodness me, I feel like I let myself down now by not releasing a flash game I made a while back.
It's never too late!
Re: Post mortem of my one game a month
#30Looks like Flax for Android doesn't respect any sort of volume control, so beware or be careful if you have headphones in.
OP here! Sorry about that. It could be a problem with SoundJS lib, because the volume is really low in my Moto G for some reason.
Now that I think of it, I didn't try it with headphones.