What Went Right

  1. Good Coding Session

    The actual coding went by as quickly as it could have. I think that this happened for a couple of reasons. For one, although this is my first "finished" 2-D game - it's not my first attempt. I'm getting to be quite familiar with SDL and game coding in general. This definitely helped how fast I coded at least a working template. In addition, the environment I was in helped tremendously. Just being in a computer lab with a bunch of other people making games made my time a lot more enjoyable. It just made it a great experience overall.

  2. Genuinely Fun

    Once there start to be 15+ asteroids on the screen, the game gets challenging and fund and you really do want to beat your own time. Or is that just me? Heh, I don't think it is, because other people seem to feel this way. I felt especially proud when one of the judges said that at that point he wasn't just playing the game because he has to but because he wants to.

  3. "Finished" Game

    More often than not, a game programmer will tell you what he/she wishes he/she could have added to a game rather than boasting about finishing a game. I'm no different, hence the quotation marks around the word finished. I think I could have done soooo much more, but the fact of the matter is, there doesn't have to be more for it to be a finished game (though it needs a lot more to be a polished game - but you can see "What Went Wrong" for that one). This is an acheivement because it is only my second finished game - my first being a text game. So before I complain, I thought I should pat myself on the back.



What Went Wrong

  1. Bugs and No Log

    Bug this Bug that. To be honest, I actually had very few serious bugs. The problem is that I didn't know how to handle these problems. For one, the game would run from inside MSVC but wouldn't run when I clicked the executable. The problem was simple enough - the executable wasn't in the same folder as it's resources. But it took me a very long time to fix the problem, and not until after I fixed the problem did I understand why there was a problem in the first place. This is why it's important to program a log. For the other game I'm working on, "Just Us", one of the first things I wrote was the log. The log I wrote for that Game would have caught the problem long before I caught it myself because if it couldn't read a resource it would have said so in the log. Therefore, for next time, I'm definitely writing a log.

  2. Lack of Polish

    My game lacks a LOT of polish. What in the world is that ugly 'crash' screen? There's no title screen. I included an incentive to play again - which is beating your own(or someone else's) time, but if you press a key too quickly, it's easy to not notice that it displays how long you lasted. All of this is to say, that in future updates, all of this will be fixed. Next time around, I'll pay more attention to the polish.

  3. Needed more Gameplay Definition

    The judges asked me a lot of the same questions. Not sure if my answers disappointed them, but it's my assumption that it did. The questions were 1) How many levels are there? 2) What's the ending of the game? My answers were 1) Just the one and 2)There is none - like the old school video games. A friend of mine also asked me if there's a boss like a big asteroid or something. There's not. How do shoot the asteroids? You can't. The fact seems to be that, I didn't define the game well enough. I and the lack of polish didn't seem to let people know well enough what they're getting into. I think the revamped story fixed it on one end, but I still have to improve the polish to fix it on the other end. Lesson well learned - next time people will have a good understanding of what they're getting into, and it won't get their hopes up.



The Final Asteroid

Overall, this is the most enjoyable programming experience I've probably ever had. I wouldn't trade it in for anything. I got to know the other WSoft members more and we all laughed together at things like the quote board. In addition, I'm proud of the game I finished. There some things I feel it lacked, but I accomplished much more than I expected to. And even though I placed quite low, I still received a prize =). My prize was NCAA March Madness 2004 for PS2 and I've been playing the game and I enjoy it a lot, so how could I ever complain. Can't wait until next time!

Note: views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's and are not necessarily those of Wolverine Soft.