DRUID Postmortem

Firstly, because I haven't attached any kind of readme to the game, I think I have to explain some basic concepts of the game for it to be playable at all:

• Druid has a list of various random spells (accessible via TAB or RMB)
• you have one active spell (stop shooting for new selection to get active)
• green clouds replace your current spell with a random one
• the point of the game is to collect more and more powerfull spells of different types

• there are three types of spells: fire, cold and acid
• different types of monsters have diffenent strengths and weaknesses
• shoot red monsters with fire
• shoot green monsters with acid
• shoot blue monsters with cold
• if monster has combined color, it's vulnerable to more elements
• black monsters are invulnerable

• enter blue cloud to enter next level (with more challenging monsters)
• try to get as much points as you can :)

Tools used:

• DevC++/MinGW
• libs: Allegro/AllegroGL/OpenGL
• GMax
• .werkkzeug1
• MS Paint
• IrfanView
• MudFont

What went wrong:

• No time for documentation: I haven't time to make any form of Readme.txt on time, and without it the game is totally unplayable.
• No sound: Again, not enough time. This was especially painfull since graphics category was merged with sound.
• Not-so-friendly theme: I was totally unprepared for the theme. I was planning to make simple Quake2 map loader and make something using it, but it wouldn't produce any form of randomness in this case.
• Coding is slower than you think it is: Original idea included way more features than the final product and was overcomplicated. Thinking about them probably slowed coding a bit. Also bugs are even more annoying when you have a time limit and I haven't thought about debugging and how much time it can take, which made development a bit chaotic.

What went right:

• Simple idea: The game is basically a shooter with some extra elements added for it to be more interresting. Different spells, monster strengths and weaknesses and adding some collecting were good ideas too (but probably made the game a bit complicated for a simple shooter). I think it can be called playable game (at least more playable than my entry at previous LD48).
• GMax is a powerfull tool: Making characters and animating them took not too much precious time and produced rather nice result.
• .werkkzeug1 is a great tool too: All particles and textures were made with it, which didn't took too much time.
• OpenGL lighting works well: And looks nice. The only problem with it is that it's limited to only 8 lights, which gets visible during more challenging battles.
• Particle system: Most of the game relies on this feature and it saved me making a couple of extra models. Also it's most suitable way of making spell effects.
• Random map generator: I think it works nice and generates interresting maps, although I don't like open areas much (but my brother do). Map generating algorithm uses floodfill many to avoid splits, which I think was a good idea and prevents broken maps from being generated.
• Spell name generator: Spells names are combinations of types of particles and "names" of wizards/druids, who have invented the spell. I think simple character name generator produces quite nice names.

Overall

As usual, I wish I had more time (or used it better) to add more features to the game. I think the game looks decent and is playable, which combined with tons of ideas left from the compo makes good start for a more serious project. The competition was fun and I'll surely enter the next one. Thanks everybody!