Time to write a post mortem for Gaming Cockroach.

The theme

“Non human player” did not click with me. I grew up with the genesis and the super nes, and quite a lot of my favorite games are staring animals or at least anthropomorphic animals: non human player is not a constraint but a given in my mind. I guess I could have done a puzzle game, but the truth is, I don’t think I could pull out a working puzzle game over a weekend… So the last idea was doing a game that was not intended to be played by a human; I thought of different things, like making my cat play with my tablet or doing some video analysis from a webcam (poor man kinect) to make you play with a plush… And it was terrible till I get an idea : I was looking to add an interface outside the game (a cat, a plush, whatever), but it could easily be done inside the game. So I started doing some 3D model of a nes gamepad.

What went wrong?

Well, I got lucky with this one: the development went right and I only got a few quacks on the road:

• Tetris is harder to clone than I thought and the result is kind of cpu demanding. Of course any modern CPU will make it run smoothly, but still, its heavy for a simple tetris.
• A real 3D approach would have been better that this pre-render thingy: took me a lot of time for pretty much nothing.
• I should have taken the time to make my own graphics for Tetris instead of using the classic Nes version. It’s not hard and I might even have learned a thing or two.
• At last but not least: don’t suppose everybody thinks like you do. To my surprise, some people did not understood that the cockroach could jump or fly, but it’s true that it’s not written anywhere. I should have done a small, one page, tutorial consisting only of a few drawings.

What went right?

• Since I saw small, I could put everything I wanted in the game (or almost, cause at the very start, the idea was to play a mouse and to have a cat wandering around randomly…)
• The result: I wanted to do some playable yet unplayable game, just to see people raging. This goal was perfectly  achieved and I’ve had some fun watching my friends loosing.
• Balance. For the very first time, I’ve had time to tweaks value so they achieved some kind of balance. The fly is timed so you’ll drop on the start button, the speed is timed so you can only do 3 action time (move, rotate and then re – move)… And overall, it seems to do what I want :3
• The konami code and the flappy bird clone made people laugh ^^;

For my third game, I’m quite satisfied with the result, and I can’t wait for the next jam ^_^.

I’d also like to thanks everybody who played it!