Against All Odds

Welcome back world! I'm finally doing the post-mortem for the 'game' I submitted to the Lisp Game Jam 2017 that happened in October. And what do you know, my submission came in first place (as unlikely as that sounds)! More precisely, the ratings were as follows:

Game	Overall score	Creativity score	Presentation score	Entertainment score	Theme integration score	# Votes
In the Realm of Dark Forces	3.083	3.333	3.667	2.667	2.667	3
NOTALONE	2.875	3.000	2.500	2.000	4.000	2
Dark Planets	2.750	3.500	3.000	1.500	1.500	2
B@TTY	2.298	2.121	2.828	1.414	2.828	1

As you can see, the ratings have to be taken with a big grain of salt since there were so few of them. Also note that the above scores are not the raw scores but scores that take into account the number of ratings. The winner in terms of raw scores would actually be the game that is last in the above ranking.

But if there is at least one thing I can deduce from this table, then it is that my entry succeeded in terms of presentation.

What Went Right

So the decision to spend time on implementing a tile-based renderer did pay off in the end, because it allowed me to make use of some well-made assets done by other people. It's really worth stressing the fact that my game contained no gameplay whatsoever and still was relatively well received. A good presentation can go a long way!

Having something decent to look at was also something that motivated me during development. Also, writing this blog really helped me order my ideas, even though it took away a little bit of development time. In particular, I really recommend writing about what you want to do on a particular day before you do it, for the very same reason that it orders the ideas in your head and makes you more focused.

What Went Wrong

It is very tempting to look at your own creations with rose-tinted glasses and evaluate them with too much forgiveness because they are 'your own children'. At the same time, it is also very tempting to be overly critical of yourself in hindsight (especially if you are doing that self-criticism in public, because it allows you to think of yourself as a righteous person); in a sense, the 'later I' that evaluates the work of the 'former I' is a kind of arm chair expert. And so, one must be very cautious with judgements after the facts.

One should also make a distinction between 'mistakes' and 'things you should not have done', i.e. between mistakes that were worth making and those that weren't. For example, here are some mistakes that I don't regret making:

• I focused on developing the graphics instead of the gameplay. Developing the tile-based renderer turned out to be way more time-consuming than I thought, because it resulted in several new sub-tasks (understanding the .tmx file format, creating extra tiles for the tilesets).
• Spend the last few hours of the game jam with polishing the look and feel. For example, during that time I implemented a simulation of night/daytime colour changes.
• I went with a slightly unorthodoxic game idea that I was interested in, instead of sticking with something more traditional and realistic.

The reason why I don't regret the first two mistakes follows from the above discussion: even I had no gameplay to show for at all, at least it succeeded in the area of visuals. The reason I don't regret the third mistake is that I doubt I would have had the motivation to work much at all on the game had it been something my heart was not in.

How about mistakes I regret? Well, ...

• Staying up 'just a little bit more' to get things done is a stupid idea in general because a) spending two more hours on game development when you are tired and exhausted is less efficient than spending those same two hours when you are fresh and awake, and b) disrupting your sleep schedule really lowers your creativity and productivity on the next day. However, this does not apply to the very last day before the deadline: if I hadn't 'crunched', I would not have been able to submit anything at all.
• Sacrificing things you normally do for game development. Again, this comes with the same caveat as the mistake above, in the sense that it doesn't apply to the day before the deadline. Otherwise, I wouldn't recommend that you miss events or activities you would do normally in order to have more time for development. What good does a few more hours do if you spend those hours feeling miserable because you denied yourself an accustomed source of pleasure?

The Real Challenge Lies Ahead

Okay, so the game jam is now well over, and technically it even was a success. Now what? Well, now comes the hardest part, because now the task of completing the game presents itself to me, and I have no energy-spending deadline ahead of me that pushes me to work, no people to compete with and compare myself with. Rather, what lies ahead of me the long, slow, and lonely crawl to completion.

Wish me luck!