It's late but the postmortem thing is as more for myself as anything.

Final journal post.

Nevertheless, even today I'm finding it difficult to spot enemies, and discovered that I can't seem to adjust my aim while holding down the mouse-button to shoot. The latter leaves me rapid-clicking to shoot, and overall I'm still not lasting long.

Try aiming with your mouse and shoot with space - holding mouse button down is for strafing - I think I forgot to mention that in the instructions...

First time when I played it in the middle of the night I had a creepy feeling similar to the first time when I played Silent Hill 2

Now THAT is what I call a compliment! :-) Thank you!

So far I have played all the games you guys have made, at this point I have only done a quick play to see if they all work and if I can pick them up without any knowledge about your games. I am very impressed with how much was achieved in a week time of making a game.

Forgot to post this earlier for anyone interested, I created a quick video for anyone unable to play, someone asked, and a quick post mortem to go with it. http://www.gamedev.net/blog/2098/entry-2262191-woa-iv-stellar-salvager-video-quick-post-mortem/

The hard work caught up with me yesterday, was pretty exhausted but it is impressive seeing what other people can achieve in such a short time!

- Team: dmatter

When playing your game I had the impression that I played a game downloaded from Nintendo 3DS Eshop, do you intend to publish it somewhere ?

Shhh, you're giving away my secrets. That's a nice analogy actually, I can see where you're coming from with that comparison. I'm delighted that you liked the game that much :)

I hadn't considered the possibility of publishing the game. It would need a little more work to smooth off rough edges and I'm not altogether sure what would be involved in the publishing itself - I imagine a conversion to HTML5 would be necessary. The game is written in Java so I believe it could be transcompiled to target <canvas> in theory.

When I died I could not restart the level but had to quit by closing the game entirely. New crashes and timeouts..

Thanks for the critique.

The lack of a restart is one of the things I regret not getting in. But I was hoping that there wouldn't be any crashes since everything seemed fine on my Vista machine and a Windows 7 one. I haven't had to deal with stuff like this where there can be significant differences between everyone's computers. How does someone go about debugging this sort of thing?

How does someone go about debugging this sort of thing?

With difficulty!

My experience for debugging this after-the-fact is:

* Logs (you probably dont have any)

* minidumps (you probably don't generate one)

* if you replicate the issue in a debug build then you can attach a debugger

This experience leads me to suggest that prevention is better than the cure. If you can use a solid abstracting framework (and you did I think? SFML) then that goes a long way. Which extends to sticking with reliable implementations (std::vector<> rather than CMyAwesomeList). And avoiding raw pointers when at all possible because it's too easy to invoke undefined behaviour which is asking for per-machine quirkiness - stick to using const-references and shared_ptr & co. and be happy. Also: Valgrind.

Speaking of Slicer, however, my review of Relic Hunter (Linux build):

[spoiler]
This game is fun, somewhat tense affair! In short, the player is a treasure-hunter invading ruins in search of some artefact or another. Alas, said ruins are monster-haunted, and our relic-hunter is unarmed. (Really, relic hunter? :P) As a result, the player is required to avoid the prowling monster, relying on darkness and the warning sound of the monster's approaching feet (hooves?), while avoiding giving away their position by either sight (being seen in the light) or sound (stepping on loose bones).

The shadows are lovely, and rather effective: they limit visibility--and thus information--without doing so to the point of being frustrating. One doesn't know what's just ahead, or in the dark to either side, which I feel made for some engaging exploration.

The controls are overall smooth and responsive. There was one issue that I found, however: the player is required to hold down the left mouse-button to direct their light. As far as I've found, there's no real advantage to leaving it pointing in one direction, so I ended up just holding down the mouse-button whenever the torch was on, which I find a little less comfortable than just moving the mouse. For myself, I'd much rather have the torch follow my mouse-movements without the requirement that a button be held.

As to the shadows and light, I have two critiques:

First, the instructions indicate that the camera doesn't follow the player when the torch is off, and this is so. But... Why is this so? I'm not sure of what it adds, and I find that it makes it easier to get lost in the dark. (Unless that's the point...?)

Second, if the player switches the torch off, moves away in the dark, then switches the torch on again, the light-blob that surrounds the player in torchlight doesn't appear on top of the character. Instead, it appears elsewhere (in the spot on which the player was standing when the torch was deactivated, I'd guess), and scrolls over to the player. The effect is a little odd.

As to the monster, it's an effective threat, I do believe. For the most part it seems that the monster can be evaded by listening for its footsteps--but on a few occasions I've stumbled upon a stationary monster, been spotted, and ended up running from it. Unfortunately, I have yet to escape a charging monster, in either dark or light, as it seems to be faster than I am.

Conversely, in at least one map I found that I spent quite some time neither hearing nor seeing the monster at all, resulting in the tension seeping away a little.

Which brings me to my next point, albeit one more to do with me than with the game: some of the maps can feel somewhat large and mazey, and of course all is rather dark. I fear that I don't have a very strong sense of direction, and can get lost or turned around somewhat easily. As a result, I ended up wandering somewhat aimlessly in one large map; if I recall correctly, I stumbled upon two keys, several doors, the artefact, and eventually the monster.

Perhaps it might be useful to have an "easy" mode that provides a simple map (filled in as the player explores)?

Another thought is that it might have helped to have provided some collectables to the various otherwise-empty rooms, especially things that might flesh out the world and characters involved. This might make the extensive corridors feel more worth exploring, provide short-term rewards for exploration, add an element of risk and reward (having gained the artefact, does the player head for the exit, or attempt to find additional items?), and perhaps to some degree mark areas that have been explored (by virtue of their no longer having collectables).

Finally, a minor niggle: In the level-selection screen, the maps appear to be out of (named) order: map two is first, followed by one, four, and three, in that order, I believe.

Alas, there is a sore lack of Sydney, Nigel, or either secretary. :/
[/spoiler]

ah, thanks for the great review! I'd like to address the critiques if you don't mind. the first is the camera movement in the dark, initially i did have this in the game. However i found it was far too easy to roam around without the flashlight on because you could use the lights near you as basically a guide. removing the camera movement added to the scary factor imo of trying to make sure the monster isn't too close to you, yet potentially being unsure of where you are. this actually directly ties into the camera movement when switching the light back on, as i found if you did move while lights were out, the sudden jump in position was a bit jarring. However as you note the player's light blob is actually centered on the camera, something that was kindof a quick hack to make work, and i didn't feel it was a huge priority to fix in the time i still had left, but it would have been better to have the light blob actually coupled onto the player at all times.

you do make a solid point about the flashlight not following the mouse, I was probably so use to the mechanic as it was i didn't consider just making it an "always on" feature. as for the maps, i was a bit afraid i had in essence gotten to "close" to the level design, and might have underestimated their difficulty. I do love the idea of adding an additional gui map for an "easy" mode, collectiables also would have been a good idea. I went with timing run's as basically your score mechanic, but adding a collectable's that added to your score might have mixed things up. For the out of order filenames, i noticed this on linux it seems the default file action isn't to auto sort by name, so i probably should have added that in very quickly, as i developed on windows i didn't even give this a thought of occurring unfortunately.

thank you for the great review though, and i'm pretty stoked it's all working properly on your system, my linux code is all through vm creation, and only a couple people have actual machines with linux running, so i'm quite glad things seem to be working smoothly there. if you don't mind me asking, what distro are you running?

ah, thanks for the great review!

It's my pleasure! ^_^

... the camera movement in the dark, initially i did have this in the game. However i found it was far too easy to roam around without the flashlight on because you could use the lights near you as basically a guide. removing the camera movement added to the scary factor imo of trying to make sure the monster isn't too close to you, yet potentially being unsure of where you are.

Hmm... Fair enough.

I wonder... Perhaps another solution might have been to make the standalone lights more sparse, thus allowing the player to wander in the dark without seeing more than the occasional glow?

this actually directly ties into the camera movement when switching the light back on, as i found if you did move while lights were out, the sudden jump in position was a bit jarring. However as you note the player's light blob is actually centered on the camera, something that was kindof a quick hack to make work, and i didn't feel it was a huge priority to fix in the time i still had left, but it would have been better to have the light blob actually coupled onto the player at all times.

Aah, again, fair enough--little hacks like this are perhaps not unexpected in short game-jams! Of course, as you note yourself, allowing the camera to follow the player in the dark would have solved both that issue and this. :P

For the out of order filenames, i noticed this on linux it seems the default file action isn't to auto sort by name, so i probably should have added that in very quickly, as i developed on windows i didn't even give this a thought of occurring unfortunately.

Ah, that's interesting. I take it then that you simply scan the appropriate directory and output the files found there?

Ironically, I think that I don't encounter this because my usual hack in short projects like this onemy usual quick hack for short projects like this simply make a list (since I use Python) that holds the relevant references; as a result, the order is whatever I assign.

There are a few of these hacky lists in my own submission; I think that I use one to specify the enemy-classes available to my spawners, for example.

if you don't mind me asking, what distro are you running?

Not at all--I'm running Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily), I believe. (With the "Cinnamon" front-end.)

Speaking of which, a piece of trivia regarding my own entry: to the best of my recollection it was developed entirely under Ubuntu Linux, with even the Windows distributable being made there. The only things that I did in Windows were installing it so that I could make the "zipped folder" submission, and testing. (The former simply because Panda3D doesn't really have a "self-contained folder" distribution option, as far as I'm aware. What I thus end up doing instead is making a "self-contained installer", then installing that under Windows and shipping the resulting folder, which seems to do the job.)