In general, I’m pleased with the game, but less pleased with the production quality that came out of it.  I justify it by pointing out that it was implemented in just a week, and that explanation seems to satisfy everyone except me.

More beneath the fold.

So here are some interesting points.  I had the basic mechanics for Robot Finds Ice Cream designed in my head by Tuesday.  At that point, you could pull or push the robot one square at a time.  At that time, I imagined that as you advanced through levels, various complications would begin to appear (moving platforms, force bridges, collapsing floors, etc).  However, I simply wasn’t getting much actual coding work done.  I’ll remind that I started on this “Game in a Week” because I was feeling unproductive;  I simply wasn’t actually coding much, and this project was supposed to kick-start me into creating again.  But in practice, I didn’t actually start coding until Thursday.  And by then, it was far too late to actually get a lot of variety into the gameplay elements.

On the other hand, I did get a lot of gameplay concept work done.  By Thursday, I had realised that allowing the player to pull or push one square at a time made the two options symmetrical, and therefore kind of boring.  And so it was on Thursday that I stumbled over the idea of being able to pull or shove, so that the two ways of moving the robot were similar, but different in an important way, and in my opinion, that’s what ended up making the game interesting.

The game finally became playable (as is almost always the case) at about 6pm on Sunday, the last day of the week-long timeframe.  In this case, I ended up with about two hours to create all the levels in the game, and so I was a little disappointed to only have ten levels, six of which were tutorial levels.  It’d be easy to add more, but I didn’t have much time, and I didn’t want to have to code save game support.  (For anyone who’s interested, the level data is in the MapXX.lvl files;  they’re just text files and can be edited in notepad or wherever.  I used vim, because I’m a hopeless nerd old-school.  Just add more of those files and the game will use them automatically.  There’s no limit to how large a particular level can be).

Level creation was surprisingly easy.  Each of the real levels was basically made by me picking a level shape that I found interesting, picking a “correct” route through it, and then placing vending machines along that route without any particular care being taken.  Most of them were interesting and solvable on the first go (although a few required minor tweaks to the level layout).

In terms of stuff that went wrong..  I’ve been making games for well over a decade, but this is the very first game I’ve made which is turn-based.  It’s also the first game I’ve made which uses an isometric perspective.  Finally, it’s the first “puzzle game” I’ve ever written where there are a series of puzzles each of which have only a single correct solution.  These caused a lot of my problems, just because this was all new to me.  For example, the isometric view angle caused all sorts of unexpected problems when I started trying to create graphics for the player and the robot;  it was almost imposible for me to create a robot sprite that matched the view angle of the isometric map.  And so in the end, I gave up and did the 2D outline of a Maximillion-style robot.  And I didn’t have time to create a sprite for the boy, and once again used the ancient “human” sprite that I made for the very first Game in a Week game (and have since used in most of the other games I’ve made on this site).

On the other hand, I was really thrilled to discover that I could automatically create an in-game tutorial just by using carefully constructed levels, just by adding a few optional text strings to the level definition.  I’m totally going to use that idea again in future projects;  it’s an awesome way to cheaply and quickly get a tutorial into a game that desperately needs one.

Also a last-moment addition was the music by Coconut Monkeyrocket.  I must remember to put music in earlier in these projects;  having the music track there really seems to inspire me to write more code faster.  So that’s something for me to keep in mind the next time I do one of these Game in a Week things.

But for right now, I’m back onto MMORPG Tycoon.  I have some really exciting things in mind for 1.1, which I’ve talked about a little over on the forums, and will undoubtedly talk about more in the coming weeks.  It’s still a little ways off, but I’m actually making progress again, which wasn’t the case back before Robot Finds Ice Cream!

This particular GiaW is interesting, in that of all the GiaWs I have done, I got the final game idea for this one the earliest in the week (Tuesday morning), but left the first implementation the latest.  This was primarily due to work and other real-life factors distracting me.  Also, I was introduced to several neat TV shows this week, all of which have conspired to pull me away from the computer.  Also also, I’ve been a little distracted by MMORPG Tycoon bugfixes and development.  Now I know how Petri feels, trying to do his monthly games while still getting work done on Crayon Physics Deluxe!

Anyhow, this is also the GiaW where I’ve used the most words from the initial quote, in setting the game theme.  The initial quote (from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, although I’m sure that the same sentence appears in the less deprecatingly-titled Philosopher’s Stone), I’ll remind, was this:

It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot.

I’ve pulled words from this passage to form my game’s theme, and the game’s theme is this:  “It is very hard to move around, because it remembers a lot.”

So.  In this game, the player takes on the role of a young boy.  This boy has a robot pet/friend/nanny, and is going shopping with that robot.  Unfortunately, the robot is being a little difficult today;  owing to a minor design flaw in its object-avoidance programming, the robot absolutely refuses to cross its own path, for fear of colliding with itself in the past.

Also unfortunately, the robot has the money.  And so the boy must get the robot to each of the vending machines in each level by pulling on the robot’s leash or shoving the robot, but with the robot never agreeing to cross its own path.

This game is strongly grid-based, and there is no time limit;  each level is a maneuverability puzzle which players must solve to reach the next level.  And it’ll be trivially easy for anyone to create new levels for the game.  And I’m hoping to set it up so that the computer can automatically generate new levels itself.  Though that might be a bit of a push, by the end of the day tomorrow.  We’ll see!

Anyhow, I don’t have a title for the game yet;  possible options I’ve entertained are “Robot Pal”, “Robot Goes Shopping”, and my current favourite, “Robot Finds Ice-Cream”.  So for right now, I’m just calling it “Robot”.

It’s past midnight at the moment, and I really need my sleep, so I’m going to keep this short.  The book for this Game in a Week is a hardback edition of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”, by J.K. Rowling (as though I had to tell you that).  This is a US printing of the book, published by Scholastic Press, and the text is copyrighted 1997.  There probably aren’t many copies of the US-titled version of the book here in Australia, but somehow I wound up with one of them, so it’s the one that I’m using.

As always, my topic selection method is to open a book randomly, and take the first sentence which is completely on the leftmost page.  From this sentence, I must choose one or more words to take as the theme for the game I’m to design and implement within the next seven days.  In this case, I’ve opened to page 132, and the first sentence entirely on that page is:

“It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot.”

In my mind, that passage kind of conjures images of a cross between Concentration and the Three Card Monte.  But I’m not nearly cruel enough to inflict such a horror on any of you fine people.  At least, not unless it gets to be Sunday and I haven’t come up with anything better.  ;)

My initial thoughts are that good words for starting with would be “remember”, and “move around”.  And if I twist it a little, maybe I could turn “lot” into “lots”, and do something with small stones.  Or the game could take place in an empty lot.  Or there could just be a lot of things to remember or move around.  So many possibilities!

Anyhow, I’ll post more thoughts tomorrow, when I’ve had proper sleep.