soybeansoft.devblog

Honestly, I’ve been having hard times to write down this post-mortem.. There were several things coming up after Pieces, including time spent to brainstorm the ‘sequel’ of Pieces (on to that later). To sum up Pieces, personally, it was an emotional roller coaster. The award was most flattering and one of the greatest moments of my life.. while on the other side, it picked up various responses including from grief players about the many resemblance to Knytt.

Yeah.. digesting the responses was a mental challenge for me, and I regret being in such a condition of loosing productivity after the release of Pieces. I wasn’t quite prepared about post-release, so I got fed up by the bug fixing until a certain condition was set, which is version 1.3. And I left it be. Until, of course the winner announcements that just.. blew my mind. I always felt that Pieces was a failure.. to have it release in a buggy manner.

But, to balance things up, there were also very encouraging comments. And the most touching moment for me was when someone mapped the whole world as a walkthrough! I was in an awe, and by that moment I knew that some are truly liking it.. a lot. ;_;

So, ok.. nuff with the emotional stuff.. Here are the things that I had in mind during and after development for Pieces:

Things done wrong

1. Next to none beta testing. Yep, you read it right. The competition was about 2 months of time + 10 days of extension. But frankly I only had 1 month and 10 days, since I started it on Feb 1st. Even on the first deadline my game wasn’t quite finished while on the second deadline, I made several last-minute fixing before the closing time. Good thing I was able to update throughout the competition.
2. Left out important credits. This was mostly the cause of grief, Pieces was understood to be inspired by Knytt, but no credit shows either the name of the game nor author of inspiration. Now, in the midst of bug fixing, I set a thought that credits is on the lower part on my TODO list. So I left it be for several weeks and realized I could’ve made some time to write down a decent credit page and cool down the fires.. but I didn’t :(.
3. Put it on NG too early. This is probably related to the commercial side of the game, but I hadn’t knew that it was important to be prepared and made sure everything is 100% OK before submitting to portals, especially NG.

Things done right

1. Invested time on coding a map editor. During prototype, I instantly knew that the game will emphasize on map exploring for it’s gameplay. So I coded a map editor in haXe with SWHX, which allows me to save and load map data into files, and also export the whole world as a Map class in AS3, ready to compile.
2. A simple and solid game design from the start. I was satisfied with the core mechanics and design everything around it. The amount and types of skills varied several times, and it depended largely on how quick I can code the basics of it. If I felt it’s too quirky or difficult, I quickly try something else.

Several technical-related issues

I had pretty much everything working really good. Map loading was surprisingly fast, and the collisions were simple and working the way I envisioned. Except for one, the progress saving system which uses LSO’s (Local Shared Object).

There were several reports and complaints about having the blue herb and after a load, it was gone, etc. I’m sure it’s something to do with LSO but wasn’t quite sure how it happened and why. Currently I’m guessing it’s a file size issue. The game needed N amount of bytes but the players computer stored less thus cropping several data. What bugs me the most is how I couldn’t fix it because I can’t make it happen in my system. 😦

Performance

I think Pieces isn’t everyones game. I found several loving it, and several hating it. I think it’s probably due to how I broke several fundamental game culture, like not allowing Proo to be able to jump at first, and the awkward way of getting skills. Plus, there were no monsters to jump on or kill.. :D.

Several stats:

• Kongregate. Submitted on March 26th, 2008. 47,338 plays, 3668 ratings (avg score: 3.39 of 5.0), favorited 300 times.
• Nonoba. Submitted on May 15th, 2008. 4.984 plays, 128 ratings (avg score: 3.5 of 5.0), favorited 44 times.
• Newgrounds. Submitted on March 24th, 2008. 1,136 plays, 267 ratings (avg score: 3.23 of 5.0), favorited 12 times.
• Mochibot statistics.