Chrome Hunter: Postmortem

Well, as you might have noticed, we stopped blogging in the middle of the project… And that’s the symptoms of “not-enough-time-itis”…

Anyway, we’ve finished the game, and I wanted to do a short postmortem on it…

What went right

• Scope wasn’t as bad as it’s usually on 48-hour competitions… We set realistic goals, and we managed to finish a pretty complete game
• Pixel art was a big win… we weren’t sure of the capabilities of our graphical artist in terms of pixel art (he’s a 3d guy), but he did an excellent job, even with the animations. He was really fast pumping out work, keeping a bit ahead of the coder (which is great!)
• Using my Ludum Dare engine instead of my Spellbook engine: although Spellbook is more complete, it’s not very compatible at this point in time (very graphical card dependent still), and it misses the “main pump” components (different screens, etc), specially on the SurgePlayer. Besides, it kept us from falling in the temptation of putting more effects, or better rendering, etc…
• A lot of gameplay/weapons/gear put in at the last hour, so the code was relatively well organized.
• The music work was awesome

What went wrong

• Lost more than 4 hours of coding (and some art time) because of the procedural robot system… We had to give up on it since it was sucking big time, and it still had lots of problems!
• UI work is painful and takes a lot of time to get right
• Not enough time to be able to test and balance the game properly… testing the game after the deadline, we’ve already found 10000 small things we’d be able to fix and balance really fast. We even found a fatal bug that will probably impede anybody from finishing the game!
• Postponed too much the splash screens, etc, so when the artist started on them, he was already dead tired and the results suffered for it.

All in all, it was a very satisfying and rewarding experience… We’re even considering taking a couple of week off Grey to polish this and try to go Greenlight it (it would be a learning experience, to get the grips on how Greenlight actually works, and if we can sell 10 or 20 copies of it at $2 each, it would already be very good for morale!)… Besides, the game is actually fun when you get into it, except for the boring stuff that can be balanced out!

We’re very happy with the end result, considering the not-so-clear ideas we had at the beginning… Stay tuned for more information in the future regarding this game (maybe we can even figure out a better name for it!)