Game-in-a-month Day 26 – The Home Stretch!

I’ve been busy the past week. Text writers, rug barriers, roach traps, oh my! Although the rug still needs it’s real texture painted, the one you see below is just a placeholder. And, I think I’m going to finish more or less on time. The more being that the engine is pretty much done, and you can menu your way from start to finish. The less being, well, there probably won’t be any levels -_-. I honestly didn’t budget any time in my original design for doing levels, as the plan had been just to use some sort of random/procedural generation for the rooms. The problem with that is, it’s not much fun defeating random rooms. Sometimes you get lucky, and everything is laid out just so, and you clear the room easily. Other times, you get frustrated because the room is quite literally impossible to beat. So I think that while the design concept and engine are rock-solid (that was the purpose of the game-in-a-month exercise, after all), without a human touch the game is little more than an (possibly) interesting tech demo. It needs human crafted stages to really bring out the best it can be, as besting another human’s creation is by far superior to simply getting lucky and occasionally defeating an aimless machine.

So what does this mean for the future? The long and the short of it is, I’m ready to take this game beyond the prototype stage. My initial fears that the mechanics would be too clunky and cumbersome to be fun have proven to be completely misguided. I’m getting a very real kick out of guiding these roaches to their final resting places via the lights. Keeping track of all the trajectories from the lamps and working them in such a way that the roaches go the way you want is not only mentally massaging, it also requires very quick decisions due to the fact that even if you completely turn out the lights, the roaches really only wait long enough for you to collect your scattered mind before moving lazily onward. And that’s if you’re lucky. It’s like a really weird mix of the feelings that I get when I play shmups and puzzle games. Smart, but with these really weird adrenaline surges every time you just barely manage to keep a rogue roach from scurrying under the couch, but still manage to keep the rest of them on track.

So here is the modified schedule. I will still be releasing a demo on Saturday showcasing what I’ve done so far and allowing people a chance to give me some feedback as well as some testing. After that, I’m going to take a few more weeks to create some hopefully stimulating room designs that will provide a variety of challenges and keep an average gamer busy for several days. I’ll also add more detail and visual/aural stimulus where appropriate. The last project I did, my editing tool Splashmap, was “completed” in roughly a month. It was serviceable, but hardly what I would call polished or even particular easy to use. An extra month later, however, and it went from night to day (except for the lack of undo/redo, I really should go back and add that). I hope to have the same kind of quality improvement with Roach Roundup. And who knows, I just may just find a better title yet again :).