600+ vector silhouettes of anime girls post-mortem

dessgeega's picture

in this thread apm posts the post-mortem of his klik of the month klub #19 entry that he promised.

SpindleyQ's picture

Alright, yes, I've been

Alright, yes, I've been meaning to start up the post-mortem train.

The initial concept for 600+ Vector Silhouettes of Anime Girls came about because I was excited about the newly-working text-to-speech abilities of Construct. A Google Image Search for "klip art" turned up the image which inspired the game's title.

WHAT WENT RIGHT:
Very little. Not only was the game completely uninteresting from the player's point of view (Eject a disk! Put it back in! Win?), but I didn't even get the tech part of this tech demo to work properly. You could spawn a bunch of disks and then pick them all up at once, for example.

For lack of any better ideas, the game became an exercise in "How can I make click-and-drag work in Construct"? It turns out the answer is, "It's not quite as cumbersome as it would be in Klik & Play, but it's still pretty tedious." I did get a chance to use Construct's "Family" concept, which worked out alright, but I'd really like to be able to define my own events, so that I'd be able to say "When disk is dropped on drive". Instead I had to say something like "When blue's instance variable id is equal to 2 and red's instance variable id is equal to 1" underneath an event that says "When the mouse button is released and blue is overtop of cursor and blue is overtop of red." Too many degrees of freedom.

Nevertheless, I did actually manage to implement click-and-drag, which I wouldn't have bothered to try in Klik & Play. So I guess there's that.

WHAT WENT WRONG:
The big one is that I had no idea how the player was going to play the game before I sat down to make it. I think that this has been the problem with all of my non-Klik games thus far.

Specifically, when making a game in Klik & Play, the first thing I do when I create an object is define its movement -- how it will navigate the game space. It's pretty much the first question K&P asks you -- when you right-click an object, it's at the top of the list. In Construct, the same functionality is buried in a funny property sheet on the side of the screen, in a tiny, usually-hidden box called "Behaviour". Instead of answering the question quickly using the powerful built-in movements, what I naturally gravitated towards doing was building an interaction model entirely in the event sheet, with only a vague understanding of what I wanted to accomplish. Thus I ended up spending most of my time building navigation and very little time building verbs to apply and nouns to apply them to.

Defining how the player navigates the game space is maybe even more fundamental than defining their verbs, as it defines how the player selects nouns to apply verbs to. I think the player's navigation options inform the player's interaction options. I can imagine a game in which the player does not actually affect the world, but the closest thing I can really think of with verbs and no navigation -- no player choice -- is some variant of Pushing The Button Will Destroy The World In An Explosion. Maybe you could have a bunch of different verbs that always applied to the same noun. In any case, thinking of these as seperate questions that have conversations with each other gives me lots of good ideas to explore.

WHAT ELSE:
Not having built-in klip art totally breaks my flow. I really hope I can figure out a way to work around this -- build some sort of standard asset pack, perhaps -- but I think if I just make sure I work out what I want my game to be beforehand, it shouldn't be a huge drag. Certainly I have done successful KotMKs before that have been light on or devoid of klip art.

Also, I was about a half hour late showing up, and so I kind of over-rushed myself.

I think that's about it.

I think I might like to do a post-mortem of fragment next, because I'm really proud of how it turned out. And nobody ever commented on it ;_;

I'd also like to see other people do post-mortems of their work! GET TO IT, GUYS AND/OR GALS.

Strong's picture

Racecar Soccer Post-Mortem

Alright, fine. I'll do one for my little game. I've never post-mortem'd anything before, but everyone starts somewhere, right?

WHAT I DID THAT WAS PRETTY GOOD:
Well, I got it finished in time. I was worried about this- this was my first KotMK and I wasn't sure if I would finish at all. I wanted to go for something simple when the idea of racecar movement came to mind. I had made a quick little demo of a soccer game before and I thought Racecar Soccer would be appropriate. What I liked about it was that I could make a game that was frustrating but still kind of fun at the same time, and it's 2-player which is an extra bonus.
I also apparently created an entirely accurate portrayal of the sport, which I was of course also striving for.

WHAT I DID THAT WASN'T AS GOOD:
There really isn't a lot of game here, and I could've added a bit more. The sound and menu are a bit rushed, too, though I don't think they ended up that bad. I should've also made the fanfare when you win a bit more, too, since scoring at all in this game is kind of a big deal.

So... yeah, I think I've effectively gotten all the discussion I can out of my little game.

qrleon's picture

Pacmortem

which one did i -- right, the pacman game.

Starting out, the view scrolled to the right constantly. I couldn't think of stuff to do for it though, so I switched to making small levels.

Turns out I unintentionally ripped off Rayman for Gameboy Color! (and maybe the original game, but I've never been able to reach the final stages so I can't tell you.) In the last areas, you have to avoid a malevolent shadow of yourself, moving in your footsteps from one or two seconds earlier ... Along the same lines as Snake, in that your own movements can trap and kill yourself.

GOOD(?):

It was kind of funny. Maybe.

BAD:

KNP's platforming movement is the worst aspect of the editing package. This more or less made my wreck unplayable.

attached to this post is a barebones redux. while still having mushy controls, it's at least consistent when it comes to ladders and midair collisions. In KNP, if you graze a wall mid-air, you will lose control until you touch ground! >:(

THINGS THAT WOULD IMPROVE IT:

* Pacman shouldn't stop when the player stops. His pace needs to be continuous.
* The player should be a ghost (what the hell, how did i miss that).
* Player should be able to gain distance on Pacman by closing/locking doors in the way. Pacman should headbutt the doors open.
* Pacman should make bestial grunts when closing in on the player, and loud, crunching, crashing sounds when breaking through stuff. He should eat random junk on the ground as his sprite passes over them.
* You should be able to distract Pacman by leading it near fruit bonuses.
* More slasher film tropes.
* Having to fight bosses while fending off Pacman at the same time

AttachmentSize
pac_munch_redux.zip1.18 MB
kirkjerk's picture

Not enough Vector

Not enough Vector Silhouettes of Anime Girls in your game

you really like post-mortems? I thought i was too whiny and introspective already

snapman's picture

"You Are Already Insane" Post-Mortem

The basic idea for YAAI came from a friend of mine, who I finally showed the game to this evening. I liked the idea of a stealth game crossed with a platformer, while keeping the two element separated. Gameplay shifts and intersecting goals interest me. Also, I wanted to make the game as disturbing as possible, given the sometimes creepy knp art. Sadly, I did not remember to make the monsters end the game, thereby forcing you to use the gun to harm innocent bystanders to avoid detection by the police. The actual event in the file tests against the wrong player instance, so the guy on the top screen remains safe from the monsters on the bottom screen (which ends up being a bit of an interesting symbolic meaning, I guess)

What went right:
The game was disturbing.
The stealth elements (not being noticed jumping over obstacles that aren't there) were well recieved.

What went wrong:
Without the monster being dangerous, the player was never fordced into comitting a crime to escape imaginary threats.

As a side note, I showed the "pac man is hungry" game to a group of friends this evening, and they all enjoyed it immensely.

pensive-mosquitoes