Fire Guard's Post-mortem

This post mortem is divided into two parts, my thoughts on the 1) competition itself and 2) my own participation.

The Competition Itself

What I liked:

• Logs in general were a fun idea
• Work-in-progress screen shots were too.

What I didn't like:

First, I never use IRC. I did for the contest, mainly because it was the only way to get up-to-date information and ask questions and get back timely answers. I found there to be way too much noise to try and read everything. This worried me, because people may have been asking rule questions and getting answers which may have affected me. (See my FAQ idea below). The IRC also seems to be addicting, as several times I was pulled in just lurking and this took away from my time working on the game.

Suggestions:

A way to edit my logs thru the web, and not have to delete my log file and re-upload each time I want to do an update.

A way to get a listing of recently updated time logs of all users.

A "competition central" page, that has all competition related links on a single page. I wasted a lot of time navigating to a page, expecting a link to another page, just to have to go back and check another page. It seemed to me that the links were all over the place. What might go on this page: Description, Rules, Entrants, Approved Libraries, All user Images, Links to each users log, link to my Log, NEW IRC information

A countdown timer page. If you are down to the wire, you can be safe you know how much time is left to upload your entry. I was worried how much my time differed between the server time or the time on ghowland's watch. I would have pushed closer to the deadline if I knew for sure.

Whenever someone asks a question regarding the competition rules (in a thread or IRC), add it to a FAQ. So, everyone could be aware of it. A simple web interface could also be created, where you ask the question, someone answers it later, ghowland or some official person answers it and the answer gets updated and available to everyone. This would be a lot easier than searching an IRC log (if you have one) or sift through the multitude of message forum threads.

It would have been interesting to have an actual count of how many people are actively participating. I don't think nearly as many of the 136 people who signed up actually participated. Maybe if there was a "Withdraw" command, people who decided not to compete could remove themselves.

My Participation

Wasted too much time on graphics. When I was unhappy with something, I erased it and started over and over again. Next time, I should do block graphics and don't try to be a perfectionist until the end. I'm not an artist, so I will never get it good enough anyway.

Spent my time early on working on the easy parts of the game, instead of the hard parts first. That was lazy of me and hurt me in the end.

Got hung up on some details, like drawing the button states of the tools. One person just replaced a single image and let you toggle through modes. That would have saved me a lot of time to do something like that.

Should have reduced and prioritized features earlier. This would have allowed more time for tweaking. As it was, after I implemented the MUST HAVE features there were about thirty minutes left before the competition ended. And I still needed to write the game instructions. Next time, work harder to manage and plan my time.

My choice of 800x600 was probably a bad one. It hurt the drawing speed. I couldn't easily change to 640x480 because of the panels skin of my game screen. Lots of drawing was done based on that screen size. Changing it would have required changing all those coordinates. I didn't have the time for that or to optimize the drawing.

I felt I accomplished a lot, and am very likely to tweak the game and add some new features, now that the competition is over. Especially after getting some real sleep.