First, I would like to say that I’m not entirely happy with Lord’s state. It has a lot of things wrong with it that are immediately visible to anyone who plays it; the pacing is the biggest offender here, I think I totally failed to convey the feeling that I was striving for. But that’s not such a bad thing; the point, after all, of trying to make a game in a week is to finish a game in a week, not necessarily to have a fantastic game at the end of it.
No, the chief failure of Lord was that it took me more than 7 days to complete. In fact, it took me 77 days to complete (that number wasn’t planned). This is the story of what happened, in the hopes that telling the story will help me keep it from happening again.
It was the day after Christmas, 2008. Picture a younger me, more hale and hardy, his cheeks still flush and aglow, strong in limb and body, his hair not yet gone grey. Flush with his youthful vigour, he thought, “Why, it’s been a long time since I’ve done a Game in a Week.. and I have a full week of vacation left before I must return to work! And work will be quite busy, so I should have fun now while I can, for I will not be able to consider a Game in a Week for a long time into the New Year!”
More beneath the fold.
Continue reading “A Long-Awaited Post-Mortem”
Quick note that I’ve finally posted the OS X version of Lord, over in the sidebar. I’ll have a Win32 build of it there within 24 hours, but I wanted to get something official uploaded before I went to bed tonight. 
There’ll be a lot more talking about Lord tomorrow, probably including a lengthy postmortem about what went wrong during its development, and about what I personally like and dislike about its design, now that I’ve actually had a chance to play it a few times.
So I’ll talk to you all again tomorrow, but right now it’s sleeping time!
Just thought I’d mention that I’ve just hit the “first playable” version of Lord, the increasingly incorrectly named “Game in a Week” that I’ve been working on in my spare hours for the past two or three months.
Ordinarily in a “Game in a Week”, I reach “first playable” somewhere between day five and day six, with a few occurring late on day seven. Since “Lord” is running so late, I’m probably going to give it just a little touch more polish, and then release it as-is. It’s not a fantastic game (though it’s not nearly as bad as I feared), but it’s a good proof of concept for 3D in the VectorStorm libraries, and I’m very interested to hear how well it runs for everyone. Depending on how much time work takes up, I’m hoping to have a package available for download as early as tomorrow evening; I only need to add a few small bits of UI and write the credits information, and it’ll be good to go.
And there’ll be a substantial post-mortem after this one, believe you me! :)
This is just going to be a very quick update. It’s been by far my longest “Game in a Week” (currently at a duration of 30 days. Not that I’m keeping count or anything.)
I finally feel like I’m in the home stretch of development. There’s about six hours remaining in the day, and I very well just might make it.
Notable new stuff in the past few days: Got the Win32 build working. Fixed rendering on 3D hardware which doesn’t support VBOs (this’ll generally be 3D hardware that’s more than about five or six years old, or poorly supported laptop video cards… of course, Lord is rather processor-hungry due to its distorting-terrain-rendering system, so it isn’t likely to run very well on really old hardware… but at least it’ll render). Fixed even yet more core 3D rendering setup problem; rotation matrix maths and a flipped rendering frustum.
Also, I managed to spend some time fixing a couple of bugs in the Lord gameplay, when I wasn’t ridiculously busy fixing the game engine itself.
So hopefully I’ll have something ready to go in about six hours! Watch this space.
[update, four hours later] I’m fading early; not going to make it to midnight tonight. Lord is close to done, but it still needs some love on the progression between levels, and some general tuning. But it won’t be too much longer; I’ve bought myself a DVD I want to watch, and I’m saving it as a reward for finally getting Lord out the door. So it’ll be soon, depending on how many spare hours I get after work, over the coming days!
Missed the three-week mark, too. Part of this was that I had to fix yet another core rendering problem which was causing 3D geometry to draw incorrectly, particularly in widescreen views. I also had yet another 3D picking bug to sort out, which took far too much time to crack (For the programmers out there, as you move across pixels on your screen, you’re not varying the angle from the view frustum linearly. I know, it sounds obvious when I say it, but that mistake was yielding lots of subtly wrong behaviour for me).
But with the above out of the way, I’ve made some awesome progress today. The core gameplay mechanic is now fully working. The world now wraps around at the edges (in fact, I usually can’t even tell where the edges are!). You can now use the mouse to scroll around the world, instead of using the keyboard.
Stuff remaining to be done: Simple models for a few types of building. Metagame structure. Sound effects. Port to Windows (should only require compiling up a Win32 SDL_Image dll). And I need to contact a particular band to find out whether I can use one of their old songs for the closing credit scroll. (I probably shouldn’t; Lord is already going to be huge, as its main gameplay music loop is about nine minutes long.. I shouldn’t add even more music data!)
