Between having no net for most of the Week of Awesome IV and a somewhat crazy workload, I never managed to travel around the various entrants and their progression throughout the week. So as a way of embracing the collective of participants, whether as an entrant or on the administrative side of the event I offer you many proverbial claps on the shoulder and my admiration at how everything ran.

Well done all and I look forward to all of you returning to next year's Week of Awesome V.

Here the post-mortem of my entry, A little late tho.

I have a question for my fellow participants:

What are you happiest about regarding your part in the competition? (Bearing in mind that the judging isn't yet in.) This could be anything--a social matter (such as getting to work with a particular person), a feature that you successfully implemented, a game-design choice that you feel worked very well, a terrible bug that you managed to squash, etc.

To start things off, let me answer my own question:

I think that I'm happiest with the moving elements of my game's level. These weren't quite as easy to implement as I think that I at first expected. In the end, it works something like this (if I recall correctly): The rigged, animated models are exported separately from the level, and their collision-models exported separately from them, tagged with the bones (so to speak ;)) to which they should be attached--Panda3D doesn't implement bone-animation for its built-in collision system, I believe. The level is exported with a marker indicating that an animated element should be placed there, and tagged with the name of the model to load. The game-logic, upon finding such a marker, then loads the indicated model, loads the collision model and attaches its parts to the indicated bones, and creates a trigger to activate the animation.

It would appear that (again) my game is too hard to play. Here's a quick playthrough I did as soon as I came back home this week (have been away for around a week).

Interesting viewing--I suspect that my own trouble at progressing in your game was combination of impatience (not wanting to slowly build up my defences), and allowing myself to be overwhelmed (i.e. overreacting to the advancing waves; being tempted into front-line fighting rather than setting up ruins to do the fighting for me--in short, not acting as an effective tactician).

It hadn't occurred to me to show a playthrough of my own--I think that I'll do so shortly!

Here the post-mortem of my entry, A little late tho.

I intend to write my own post-mortem only after the judging is in: I find that external feedback can have a significant effect on how I see my entry, and its development during the competition. Indeed, I recall that in the first Week of Awesome that I entered (Week of Awesome II, I think), I ended up writing two post-mortems: one before the judging, and one after, my perspective having been shifted significantly by the feedback gained.

I have a question for my fellow participants:

What are you happiest about regarding your part in the competition? (Bearing in mind that the judging isn't yet in.) This could be anything--a social matter (such as getting to work with a particular person), a feature that you successfully implemented, a game-design choice that you feel worked very well, a terrible bug that you managed to squash, etc.

Three things:

- I'm happiest with the visuals and the story; they came out better than I had imagined. (Character art and story = Celesol's work, background art was primarily my work with some Celesol additions).

- A design choice that worked very well for such a short-term contests was going with a pre-rendered background. It took some finagling to get the collision rects and event triggers lined up properly with the world, typing rect numbers into a text document and hot-reloading it, but overall I think it saved alot of work creating the world (since it was a small world).

- A feature that I successfully implemented was the turn-based combat and event dialog system. I was apprehensive about it, because I had never implemented such a system before, but I had an basic insight early on (event systems and combat systems are the same thing!) that made it real easy to code the basic framework (which was finished the framework on the second day, even though I didn't code the combat until the final night).

Using what I learned on the combat/event system, I'm going to rewrite essentially the same event framework but better, and use it for my main project, Of Stranger Flames.

Also, nothing like a time-constrained game jam to help prioritize tasks. I've spent far too much time on my real project, Of Stranger Flames, working on too generic pieces of code that are inconsequential, and so once I get back to work on Of Stranger Flames (in several weeks from now), I'll re-focus on making real progress rather than trying to perfectly code the engine's asset management code (where I've blown too many months to count).

What are you happiest about regarding your part in the competition? (Bearing in mind that the judging isn't yet in.) This could be anything--a social matter (such as getting to work with a particular person), a feature that you successfully implemented, a game-design choice that you feel worked very well, a terrible bug that you managed to squash, etc.

I'm happiest with how well put together "the rest" of my game is, last year I learnt a lot about actually giving the game to people. I had not thought about things like controls, options and tutorials and it hurt peoples ability to play the game. This year I had them on my mind so the earlier releases included them, so the game includes simple image showing the controls and UI descriptions (I would have liked something interactive). The menu included options to remap keys, last year I used numpad keys because it felt comfortable for me but one guy didn't have a numpad, he could not play at all.

For the actual game, I'm happy with the sounds. Last year I had no sounds, time was an issue but I was also surprised by the license on the audio library i was about to use, I hadn't used that license type before so put the whole thing off thinking it was not important. Just a couple of simple noises completely change the feel of the game and the sense of how complete it is.

Also for the judges, how is the judging going? I'm keen to get any feedback!

Joy. I just discovered a once-off crash in my game. Thankfully it seems to be rare, but it is present. (Specifically, it happened when stepping off of the "lift", towards the end of the game.)

On a more positive note, have a video of me playing through my game, beating all enemies--only to make mistakes at the final boss and be killed. (I think that I should perhaps have kept moving until the spray of energy bolts subsided, then turned down the light, healed, and made a proper start to the fight.)

(I noticed only too late that audio doesn't seem to have recorded. I fear that I disabled audio recording for the purposes of making GIFs, but failed to re-enable it for this video. My apologies for this! ^^; )

Note that I keep moving, and when my health drops low I slip away from the fight, turn down the light, and heal. In the big fight that starts at about 1:03, I make a point of killing off the weaker enemies first (and especially the ranged enemies), then deal with the tougher enemies at the end.

I will say that playing through the game again after some time away has highlighted some of the flaws in it, I think. :/

What are you happiest about regarding your part in the competition? (Bearing in mind that the judging isn't yet in.) This could be anything--a social matter (such as getting to work with a particular person), a feature that you successfully implemented, a game-design choice that you feel worked very well, a terrible bug that you managed to squash, etc.

I think what I'm most happiest about is that I actually like the the basic game play of what I submitted. The last times I've taken a shot at a game jam sort of thing, I just had no idea what to do with the theme and ended up with stuff that wasn't fun and just plain didn't work. Maybe it was a bit of luck. On the last day I added in the two or three lines of code to spawn a new skeleton after you kill one and I tested it out and as their numbers increased that's when it felt like I had accomplished something that has eluded me in the past.

I have a question for my fellow participants: What are you happiest about regarding your part in the competition? (Bearing in mind that the judging isn't yet in.) This could be anything--a social matter (such as getting to work with a particular person), a feature that you successfully implemented, a game-design choice that you feel worked very well, a terrible bug that you managed to squash, etc.

Well, this is the first project in which I participate solo (Correction: second, but the first internationally, with people from various places and groups of varying sizes). So glad to have been able to do something with a minimally solid foundation. 2D is not exactly my forte, but this Jam wanted to focus on this aspect, forcing me to learn new things. What I enjoyed most was to develop the idea and create a basic story for the game exists, beyond retro game art.

Only wish I had more patience and time to improve the AI of enemies, improve the level generator and have avoided the vsync bug (which I was informed quickly by slicer4ever - thank you again!).

And I still hope that someone would take the 3 references in the monitor: D

What are you happiest about regarding your part in the competition? (Bearing in mind that the judging isn't yet in.) This could be anything--a social matter (such as getting to work with a particular person), a feature that you successfully implemented, a game-design choice that you feel worked very well, a terrible bug that you managed to squash, etc.

For me, it is a very valuable exercise to have a hard time limit to actually deliver something. Usually I muck around with my game engine, perfecting this bit and that, instead of actually making a game. Participating in game jams is the 'proof of the pudding' for me - I have to use my self rolled engine to actually create a game. Usually i encounter lots of problems and expose bugs. But this time around I am happy to say that it was actually quite a joy to use the engine to create something enjoyable to play in a relatively short time, getting it out there and getting feedback on the way.

So - who's up for Ludum Dare 36? :-) http://ludumdare.com/compo/

And I still hope that someone would take the 3 references in the monitor: D

One, if I'm not much mistaken, referenced Shaun of the Dead. (That would be the list on the post-it note.)

So - who's up for Ludum Dare 36? :-) http://ludumdare.com/compo/

Eh, I don't think that Ludum Dare is a good fit for me--the forty-eight-hour duration is a bit short, for one thing.