Post-Jam

Well, now the game itself is done (as it's going to get for the Jam), and the hard part begins... WAITING FOR RATINGS!

One of the biggest things I missed was sound. It would be really nice to hear something, even repetitive music. One thing that came to me while doing this is that you should engage as many of the player's/viewer's senses as possible. I come from an era of silent (or mostly silent) games (the ZX81 sound hardware was less than spectacular), so I don't normally think of it as part of the package. But it should be. And smell-o-vision too if I could swing it...

Getting the fight logic working was quite annoying. It's a state machine, but it was difficult to debug. Sometimes one state would step on another, timers weren't incremented and so on. It does work, but it's not a bit perfect and feels like I've done something wrong somewhere. 

It would also be good if it was just easier to fire off long running animating objects. That way I could have had the "bling", like sparks and flares and flames. Since I wrote the "engine", this is a problem I can fix, but I have to figure out how to. I am pleased at how much I was able to make work.

I also need to take more advantage of my underlying design. I started to do this with the hidden rooms, like "intro" (Castle Keeper with instructions) and "valhalla" (where the Keeper resurrects you). They're defined like any other room you could go to, but you only get there through special circumstances, like a conversation script event. I should have been able to do this with the title screen as well, not to mention deal with different branching conversations during the trip to valhalla.

But speaking of conversations -- I was really happy with the conversation system and the art I did for it (OK, two sprites), was the best of the batch. It was very simple and effective.

I somehow think that if I could properly distill down to the simplicity I need, I would only have half the code...