Saturday, March 15, 2014

Day 7 - Success!



Third Planet

I have finished my 2014 7 Day Roguelike - Third Planet! I have done everything I can to stay within the spirit of the challenge. I tried to make a complete game with all the features I planned. I tested it as well as I could alone. It has multiple levels and a win condition with a bit of a story to guide the way. I supported several key options and provided a help screen. I uploaded the game for review and technically have about 7 hours left in my week. Therefore, I am calling this year a success!

I got a lot of polish in my last day. I tweaked the alien AI to make it hard but not impossible. I also made some other changes to get it in a good spot. I worked on the difficultly curve quite a bit. It was hard to gauge since I could not beat it without cheating. I was able to complete the last two levels starting out there. I think start to finish is doable and provides a good level of fun and challenge. I will work on beating my own game outright later.

I added the energy system I planned. It was needed to balance the game and it gives a resource to manage which I think is fun. It was a bit more challenging than I thought it would be to get something that worked well.

I worked on level generation quite a bit. I tried to place elements in interesting ways but keep randomness. I would like to have added some more variety but I think for the length of the game it is adequate.

I cleaned up the interface and added a nice font. I was looking for a way to represent energy besides a number. I thought of a graphic and then I realized - 'duh' the @. I am happy that I worked that in.

The last thing I did for features was improve the transitions and ending. They were abruptly jumping to the next phase which didn't give a good feeling of flow. I wanted a something to happen for beating the game too. You have to do it to find out what it is though!

I cleaned up my compiler warnings, removed invincibility, added various key support and generally tried to get everything tidy. That way I was really prepping for a final deployment. I know its legal to have a later bug fix release. I just didn't want to intend on it.

I really enjoyed the experience this week working on my game. Completing a game is something I have daydreamed about for some time. Now I have done it!

Third Planet 7DRL

No comments:

Post a Comment