Thanks for this. I am currently in the middle of month 1 for 1GAM and appreciate the inspiration. It is awesome to read about a person experiencing the same issues as me, then overcoming them.
Post mortem of my one game a month
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Re: Post mortem of my one game a month
#32I'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 :)
Out of curiosity, what tools do you use to make the artwork for your games? Anything outside of the standard linux image applications (gimp, inkscape) ? I've always been curious about making my own game, but when I sit down to work on the art assets, I end up getting very frustrated and tend to put those projects aside.
Re: Post mortem of my one game a month
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :)
Out of curiosity, what tools do you use to make the artwork for your games? Anything outside of the standard linux image applications (gimp, inkscape) ? I've always been curious about making my own game, but when I sit down to work on the art assets, I end up getting very frustrated and tend to put those projects aside.
I use Gimp mostly, once I learnt how to tweak it for pixel art it is quite good.
For me all starts with the right palette. It really helps to get what you're looking for. I usually work with 64 colors (unless there's any special restriction, of course).
Re: Post mortem of my one game a month
#34I 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 deve…
This seems like such a fun challenge. I just completed my first Ludum Dare Jam with a friend (72 hour gamejam), and we both learned a lot. Right from the start we had to manage a "72-hour TODO" list and a "Maybe we'll enjoy this game enough to take it past the weekend TODO" list. And things kept being moved from one list to the other.
I think the most important take-away for me was how important careful planning is right at the start. As we got closer and closer to the deadline, the code got nastier and nastier. But I made sure we spent several hours just planning our design before even touching any code, and that the foundation was solid. It wasn't until the final 6 hours or so that we had other entities animating on the screen. But by then everything just came together, and filling the game with more content and additional levels was a breeze. Need to add a complex feature? Great! We've already planned for it, and it takes 2 lines of code.
There's a short little blog entry I read years and years ago that I still remember, called "Black Triangles" which is similar. About developing a game for the original Playstation, and spending over a month to just get a black triangle rendering on screen. http://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=7745
We actually have decided to take our little game past the weekend, so maybe this will become our first One-Game-A-Month Game.
Re: Post mortem of my one game a month
#35Thanks for this. It's very interesting and is inspiring me to consider taking it on in 2015. Though I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. :)
Re: Post mortem of my one game a month
#36Crosswalk has the downside that it produces huge applications, at least relatively speaking (30+ MB). Is plain old Cordova viable if you want to ship an application that runs on Android 2.3 onwards? Reading their blog I think they have fixed the issue with hardware acceleration on KitKat.
Re: Post mortem of my one game a month
#37Earlier 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…
Not if you consider it a post-mortem of the development. When the project is done, development is dead (cue: pedantic comment on product life cycle). So it's not technically a post-mortem of the game, but a post mortem of the development process of the game. The post-mortem's at Games Developer/Gamasutra are typically for commercial games, and often offer a retrospective of launch and relative popularity as well.
Re: Post mortem of my one game a month
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Re: Post mortem of my one game a month
#39Crosswalk has the downside that it produces huge applications, at least relatively speaking (30+ MB). Is plain old Cordova viable if you want to ship an application that runs on Android 2.3 onwards? Reading their blog I think they have fixed the issue with hardware acceleration on KitKat.
Unfortunately no. There is a HUGE gap in the WebViews that ship between 4.0 and 5.0. Also, WebGL is not supported by any native Android WebView until 4.4. CrossWalk effectively lets you ship the latest Chrome WebView for all devices running 4.0+
Re: Post mortem of my one game a month
#40I 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 deve…
I was just thinking of starting "one game a month" on my own, but I didn't know about 1GAM. Thanks for the heads up!