January 19, 2010

Postmortem: The Chronicles of Bim: The 100 Fake Afros

My first shooter! It's working (although a friend got a null pointer error) so I'm a little happy.

The Time

I spent about 24 hours on this game. A whopping 30% was break time, mostly me eating, reading manga or playing games... This is proof of me being really lazy this month I think.

It's pretty cool that everything regarding the scripting, loading the little levels I had from lua files and writing them took only a mere hour! I could have saved so much time if I would've scrapped the whole levels idea completely. (Levels are more than just the code it takes to load them from a file... a lot more)

Immersion

We all love big bangs and loads of stuff flying around on screen and sadly I didn't deliver. I had all these ideas of pieces of dead afros flying around and dead things piling up on the ground which you'll walk over... but I never did any of it which is sad cause it would be pretty damn cool.

Another thing is the messages on the left side. Pretty cool - if they would actually say anything, but again I didn't have time or the inclination or whatever to do anything with it...

All we're left with are the quakes which are kinda cool but they could do with some tweaking, maybe shorter and less frequent to really get the omg effect.

Gameplay

It plays okay. Not a lot happening, it's just a race against time. The immersion part would really hot up the gameplay cause really, it's fun to blast things into the sky!

Conclusion

The game feels like it's not finished. The whole afro thing was cool but it's not revolutionary or anything different. It's stuck in the middle between random ideas and mediocrity. Too bad.