Post Mortem, Simply Escape

So that went quite well! This time, I took a couple days off work afterwards to give myself time to recover, so I didn’t feel like I needed to stop early. I figured I spent about 20-24 hours actually working on the project this time.

The game seems generally well-received. The comments so far are encouraging.

Simply Escape

What Went Right

I accurately gauged my scope. Partly this was due to having a minimal idea with potential to grow. I had hoped to add a couple more rooms. By that, I mean the same room again, but with more things to do. The next thing I added would have been a series of buttons around the room, and an oldschool LCD single-digit display with how many buttons were left to find. The buttons would have been hidden in different places. I’m pretty sure I was going to hook that to the drawer, so that it can’t be opened without pushing the buttons first. I’m not sure what would have been in the 5th room yet.

I spent enough time on it. Last time, I just felt too pressured to be rested for work on Monday, so I quit at like 12-16 hours. I was able to spend a lot more time this time, and I’ll likely continue the vacation thing for the next LD.

Modeling. I actually managed to model up some decent assets, and even used Substance Designer to make a dynamic material for the safe combination. (It was random each time you play, which is something that doesn’t really show up unless you replay it… Which I imagine nobody did.)

What Went Wrong

Sound. Oh man, those sounds are horrible. I used bfxr (website like sfxr) and it really wasn’t capable of making the sounds I needed. I had considered recording them manually around my house (open my squeaky front door, draw a box along the wall for the drawer and picture sounds, etc) but in the end I decided I’d rather put in more work on other stuff.

Controls. Ugh. I’m so ashamed of how bad the controls are. The mouse is too sensitive, so you can’t accurate mouse over things. The mid-screen reticle also relies on the mousepointer being in the same location. Locking the mouse pointer should have done that, but it’s usually off center by a bit. To make it worse, the Windows build keeps the mouse in a slightly different spot than the Web build, leading to one or the other not being right. Finally, gamepad support also requires the mouse to be in the center. I will completely re-do these eventually.

Oculus Rift support. I really, really wanted to support the Rift. But I didn’t know how to integrate NGUI’s cameras with the Rift’s cameras. Initial experiementation with this has been bad. I’ve settled right now on just having 2 cameras for the GUI that don’t do warping, etc. I also need to figure out how to control NGUI’s menus with a controller. Ironically, it’s much easier to turn an FPS camera into a Rift camera than all the rest of this stuff. sigh I’m still working on this and hope to add a Rift build to my list, though I’m not submitting it for judging. (Even though porting is allowed, I feel there’s too much work going into it to be fair in the contest.) With my work and life commitments, it may not be done before the end of the contest, though.

Overall

Overall, I think things went well. My goal this time was to finish and end up with a fun game. While I think it could have been more fun, I think I managed the goal on a minimal level. My goal next time will be to have something unique or innovative. That’s a much taller order, but we’ll see how it goes.

In the meantime, I’ve found some things I need to look at and figure out how I’ll handle them in the future. I did a lot of stuff on the fly this weekend that I should have already done previously, and it took time that it shouldn’t have.