Postmortem for Twelve Hours

The 2011 7DRL challenge has come and gone and although I finished my entry Twelve Hours, it wasn't as fun or interesting as I expected. I learned some stuff about programming and design as well as game mechanics and gameplay - and I get to write a postmortem!

I knew from the beginning I wanted you to be one of many heroes but I wasn't sure if you'd be on the same team or rivals or what the story would be. It took a few days to come up with the 'defend the village' story and until then there was a lot of changing my mind and trying little changes and general aimlessness. The final game still feels unfocused and I believe much of that is because I was unsure what the story would be for the first %50 of the time. The survival theme also wasn't as fun as I expected. Once while playing Star Craft I remember a heart pounding, grueling, gut wrenching level that ended with me nervously watching the timer count down as the Zerg swarmed my Terran base, demolishing my major buildings and cutting through my inner defense, rushing toward my heroes as my last marines fell to give me the few seconds I needed to win. Playing Twelve hours should have been more like that, or any decent zombie movie right before the good guys bust in and save everyone, but it ended up with me either relaxing in the town center while the villagers fend off ghosts or with me trying to keep up with the fighter chasing down a few stray skeletons. I tried to emphasize the heroes and working together to save the weaker ones by de-emphasizing the stats and inventory options but I ended up with a game where those aspects just feel weak and only partially implemented.

As far as technical learning, this was the first time I used the A* algorithm (I had always used Dijkstra maps) and even though there's a lot of hard-coded junk in there, it went well and I can add that to my toolbox. Creating separate Creature and CreatureController classes was, I suppose, the textbook-correct thing to do, but I found that they are so tightly coupled that they might as well be rolled into one class. I've played around a bit with that and it seems much better. I also got to try deploying my second Java applet (the example for my AsciiPanel project being the first). I prefer C# but chose Java since it works better cross platform and because I found the C# silverlight api to be unbearable. The deployment didn't go perfectly and it seems like it isn't working now so I made it run as an applet or a standalone app - which was neat. The code itself is exactly what you'd expect from a 7 day project; it's thrown together, cut's corners, and has a lot of hard-coded junk, but it get's the job done and hints at how it could be improved.

The 7DRL challenge is a neat opportunity for a small project with a deadline that allows for creativity, comp-sci algorithms, storytelling, and trying new things with code design and game design. It's bigger than a code kata but small enough that it's still good for learning. I'm not sure if the 7DRL challenge is more for the players, the programmers, or the RL community, but I definitely benefit from it as a developer. A lot of neat ideas get explored and it can be great fun for the developer even if the end product is aimless and feels like it hints at more than it delivers.