Hi everyone!

I thought I’d write a bit of a post-mortem for my game, Thievery, but in doing so decided on something a bit different.  From my git logs for the game, I have a reasonable record of what happened when (and can take a fair guess at the rest), and thought I’d post it to see if it’s of interest.  The stats at the end were interesting for me (:

My game is about helping a thief sneak around and steal gold from houses and pickpocket guards, while avoiding capture by the guards and guard dogs.  Note that the times listed below include a fair bit of time spent on “art” – it was definitely programmer art, so nothing too impressive, but it still took time (:

Saturday December 15

02:00 Theme announced; I'd decided to sleep through and find out in the morning
 08:00 Woke up; started getting ready and brainstorming at the same time
 08:30 Started work on Thievery
 09:08 Got a basic loop running, with newly-created background and placeholder player sprite
 10:15 Added player movement
 12:53 Added dagger shooting, after spend ages on sprite rotation
 13:18 Finished lunch
 14:13 Put guard & thief images in
 14:46 Can now shoot guards with daggers, using rectangle collisions
 14:57 Limited player movement to the screen dimensions
 15:45 Back from 45 mins jogging
 16:39 Added basic stats, plus dying animations for characters
 16:49 Added damage animation
 18:51 Added houses
 19:20 Wrote some basic level loading code
 19:40 Finished dinner
 20:31 Fixed rectangle collisions (for daggers/houses, etc)
 20:58 Added circle collisions (for living/moving things)
 21:46 Added chests
 23:54 Added looting
 00:30 Guards now chase the player when seen
 00:56 Guards now hit the player when in range
 01:10 Now reports player death, and forces restarting
 02:13 Added guard patrol routes

Sunday December 16

08:00 Woke up
 08:30 Back to work
 10:03 Guards now move around obstacles, instead of getting stuck
 10:23 Added pausing
 11:07 Guards now can't see through houses
 12:39 Added basic events system and character chatter
 13:40 Back from an hour at the gym
 14:00 Finished lunch
 15:48 Added more events with chatter, and a win screen
 16:48 Added guard vision cones
 18:00 Back from meeting friends for 45 minutes
 18:20 Guard vision cones now turn red when chasing
 19:32 Added better level data
 19:50 Guards can now only see forwards
 20:00 Finished dinner
 21:09 Added intro screen
 21:15 Guards can now see at 90 degrees at close range
 22:09 Added guard dogs
 22:35 Added Pickpocketing
 00:07 Added sounds, including triggering from events
 00:49 Added music - main and win screen
 01:30 Windows build fixes: paths, extra keys
 01:49 Added guard alerts
 01:58 Submitted Linux version
 02:00 Deadline for development (start of submission hour)
 02:06 Submitted Windows version

Overall totals:

• Programming: 25 hrs 30 min
• Art: 3 hrs 45 min
• Level and other content design: 1 hr 35 min
• Sounds: 45 min
• Music: 30 min
• Breaks, etc: 4 hrs 30 min
• Sleep: 11 hrs 45 min (+2 hours before LD25 started)

Final points

• Most fun thing to put in: guard and thief chatter (I couldn’t be too inventive given my tiredness, but it was still satisfying)
• Next thing I would’ve done if I had time: given the player a way to hide from guards to get away
• Thing to do for next time: get better at art (;
• Thing that I wasted the most time on: sprite rotations (got confused about centre-relative vs corner-relative, rotation angles and units, etc)

I had a great time creating this game.  I’m glad that many of you have had a play and enjoyed it, and hope you all enjoyed yourselves making your own games as well (:  Good luck to all in the voting!

Tags: postmortem