Game post-mortems

My experience has taught me one simple lesson...

When you have an idea for a game create it in it's entirety, or at least one full level, keep all your great stuff out of it, just put it together, make it cool, and then wait for feedback, going headlong into a game mechanic that gets dissed by the community is a hard thing to face.

So again what I learned is keep it simple in the beggining and then apeal to the masses.

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Originally Posted by everfornever

My experience has taught me one simple lesson...

When you have an idea for a game create it in it's entirety, or at least one full level, keep all your great stuff out of it, just put it together, make it cool, and then wait for feedback, going headlong into a game mechanic that gets dissed by the community is a hard thing to face.

So again what I learned is keep it simple in the beggining and then apeal to the masses.

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It sounds like you have some good advice but I don't completely understand what you're trying to say... Are you saying to create the whole game first, or to get feedback first and then improve it? I'm confused.

Could you give an example of what you would have done with a specific game, like mine maybe? Because "going headlong into a game mechanic that gets dissed by the community" is pretty much what happened with me.

Nice write up axcho :)

I liked the comment "Other games, even really bad ones, make you feel like you're accomplishing something". Do you feel in hindsight that there should have been more reward for the player ? Even if only after every so often it just said "Next Level" ?

On to bold Vmx :)

"decided to live with the mess instead of spending an hour organising everything"

An hour well spent :)
I've done it before where I've been given so many assets in one hit that the library looks like a bombs hit it, so just keep it simple:
Imported Art
Movies
Graphics
Preloader
SFX
And just drop everything into those folder, you don't need sub-folders if you're just tiding up.

Honestly it'll help so much near the end of a project when you need to update something.

"I don't like saving separate files in Flash"

Me neither. I just do it once at the start of every days work. So open the current fla, save as todays date, drag the previous days one into the _dev folder, and then go back to just pressing save every two minutes ( Something else I do. God coding is just pure ocd isn't it ).

"In my experience, loadMovie() hates people like me, so I'm afraid to touch it nowadays."

Used to be the same, I also feared xml. Now I can't live without either. It's just practise and getting your head around stuff that seems really weird at first.

"Euphoria"

:)

Squize.

@Squize: Most of the stuff in my game wouldn't fall into any of those categories, and wouldn't narrow down the list of symbols very much. I would need something like 100 folders to narrow it down a useful amount, and that'd take ages to set up.

"God coding is just pure ocd isn't it" - Spoken like a true veteran and code guru. :)

Also, another problem with Flash MX that hit me pretty hard during Commando 3... the Output window doesn't work:

http://www.birchlabs.co.uk/Output.png

You have no idea how hard the game was to debug. Sure, I could copy and paste the text into a text editor, but most things require me to be able to read the Output window while the game is running and react to those messages. Also note that this screenshot is of an actual error, not a traced value. With errors, some of the characters do appear correctly, but when using trace(), the entire top half of every character disappears.

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Originally Posted by Squize

Nice write up axcho :)

I liked the comment "Other games, even really bad ones, make you feel like you're accomplishing something". Do you feel in hindsight that there should have been more reward for the player ? Even if only after every so often it just said "Next Level" ?

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Thanks. What I kind of had in mind are those "defense games" where you mostly are clicking as fast as you can (though some have more interesting gameplay). But you get upgrades and levels and stuff that makes you think you're accompling something and want to keep playing. It's like the game itself is not in the action but in the reward structures.

I think in Braids, I wouldn't try to change it to fit that kind of overall structure, but in my next games, I will definitely keep that in mind. I'm starting one game that is quite similar to Braids, but at first glance will look and feel much different. It will be an experiment to see if I can engineer a hit by cramming humor, excessive violence, upgrades and customization, and levels into an innovative but traditional Flash game.

My vision for Braids was very non-traditional in terms of the typical Newgrounds flash game. It is not yet finished. The important overall structure really is still missing. What is missing is a feature for recorded games, so it can be used as an animation and social tool; for recorded AI, so people can compete indirectly online by trying to train or engineer the best AI; and for dynamic music so it can be just a fun non-competitive experience if you choose. This would go beyond the normal "upgrades and levels" structure of most Flash games and build it into a larger, more chaotic, social structure over the web. That was kind of what I was thinking. :rolleyes:

:p

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Originally Posted by VENGEANCE MX

Alillm, you neglected to mention the fairly serious issue of Neon not working on Macs. :)

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Like I said, a full post mortem is on the way, that will be covered there :)

Ali

I just put up a postmortem for Sunken Treasure at the farm if anyone's interested:
Final Thoughts: Sunken Treasure

I actually have a few posts about the game's development, since I was trying to post while I was making it. If you want to track the whole progress you can just do a search for Sunken Treasure to get all the posts.

If anyone wants to read more, I just wrote a blog post about this:

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Originally Posted by axcho

What I kind of had in mind are those "defense games" where you mostly are clicking as fast as you can (though some have more interesting gameplay). But you get upgrades and levels and stuff that makes you think you're accompling something and want to keep playing. It's like the game itself is not in the action but in the reward structures.

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Nice post.
I like the comparison to Candyland.
I don't think that a unique control scheme is the same as having good gameplay though. Tri-achnid is fascinating in its originality, but in the way of actual gameplay I don't find it any more compelling than Red Baron. I didn't play it for very long, but it doesn't seem to offer much in terms of goals, risk/reward structure or chance. It's all about just moving this thing around. At least Red Baron has some good action moments.

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Originally Posted by cadin

Nice post.
I like the comparison to Candyland.
I don't think that a unique control scheme is the same as having good gameplay though. Tri-achnid is fascinating in its originality, but in the way of actual gameplay I don't find it any more compelling than Red Baron. I didn't play it for very long, but it doesn't seem to offer much in terms of goals, risk/reward structure or chance. It's all about just moving this thing around. At least Red Baron has some good action moments.

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Thanks. What I mean about Tri-achnid is that moving the thing around is a lot more interesting and fun than moving around your character in Red Baron. In terms of external reward structures, Red Baron may be superior. That was mainly my point. :)

I will say this before I throw into it: Most of my projects, since I'm still eight to nine months young into Flash, start with a simple idea and incoorporate ideas or parts of the language which I've never tried but would like to learn. I'm doing a simple shooter now, but in my next game I hope to start using bitmap caching. Anyhow...

One and only one postmortem.

Flashbang

Thought up a really clever idea to port to flash, and in my search for knowledge to accomplish the feat, had the project stolen from right under my nose. Kept going with the project, only to have mixed emotions for audience in its feedback release. Project set on backburner while other projects and time take precedance. Game roughly 45% done.

Looking back at it, I should keep questions more general and stop handing out fla's to greedy fingers.

One way to keep track of your changes and revisions is to use a real version control repository. They are pretty straightforward to install and configure. We use Subversion and love it. You can host it on your home network easily or for 8 bucks a month you can host it with a 3rd party like http://www.devguard.com. Both Mac and PC clients are available and easy to use. If you are using AS2 and classes, it gets even better, you can then do "diff" and see the differences between versions. Very nice all around.

http://www.tortoisecvs.org/ all the way baby

I prefer Subversion over CVS quite a bit. There are several huge reasons:
1) Directories are proper entries in SVN
2) You can rename directories and files and retain history in SVN
3) You can move directories and files and retain history in SVN

SVN is much more "refactoring" capable then CVS. With CVS you delete and re-add every time you want to refactor some code. It basically punishes you for trying to refactor package names and/or class names. SVN has none of those problems. Many of the complaints with SVN are just that it handles tagging and branching differently then CVS, thats true and I'm not sure how much I like how it does it, but I've never had a problem with it.

Oh, BTW, Tortoise is available for SVN too ;)
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

Have fun!

I love that braids game, how did you manage to give the ragdoll bendy limbs?

Go here for a list of ragdoll games i started. ( i <3 ragdolls ) :)

Mate, are you posting in every thread that has a vague mention of ragdolls ?

There's really no need to, if you want to link to your source just post in the knowledge base and when it gets updated your link will be added to the rest.

Squize.

I've played this game and will admit that game pwned. I can't remember if it was this year or not, though. Either way, I loved it.
Cool Game.


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What music do you like?
destinys child fans site

Thanks for clearing that up.

Squize.