Let's be a troll - post mortem

The design and development of this game was rather short sighted. I created this game for the 1 bit game jam. Once I saw that the goal was 1 bit I decided I would be making my own game engine in the console, and develop a game from there. Although that's not entirely what happened. I used the  olcConsoleGameEngine and modified it to work for my purposes. For example I added proper AABB collision detection, and managed sprite handling. I needed to modify the core rules to allow me to work in only black and white, and finally I needed to get the sound system working. Getting the sounds working was the hardest thing to do, so instead I think I chose to just have beeps and boops running on a separate thread as the main game as to not cause a pause while the sound plays out. If you're at all familiar with C++'s beep system you know what this means. If you're not however what happens is when you call the beep function, you must wait for the entire beep to play out, then the application can proceed as normal. With a game with lots of sound effects that's just not acceptable, so a separate thread must be allocated. 

In retrospect the game could have been allot better. I would have liked to have gotten the bridge destruction working, but it never found its way into the final game. I did however create a true to life proper 1 bit game. It runs on a potato and can be fun to play. 

I learned through this process that in the future I should not only create a rough draft idea as above, but also develop a short list of final goal features. For example *Sound *Graphics *Mouse input *Mouse collisions all of these are things that ended up in the game, but I never had a list of them, I just winged it. If I had a list things would have gone much smoother. The process as a whole wasn't too bad as it was a fairly simple game, but the development was a slog, and I would have preferred to have had a proper goal in mind. 

The idea was: The civilians would be walking across the bridge, and you would need to scare them off and they would drop gold as they ran off. The arrows would then damage your bridge and you would need to repair it. There was going to be knights that couldn't be scared, and would kill you. You were to let these guys get hit by an arrow, then try to scare them. In the end I only got the civilians crossing the bridge, never being scared off. So I guess you're just eating the civilians who try to cross the bridge. And the arrows don't actually damage the bridge, and are very manageable overall. So you don't ever need to repair the bridge.

I didn't win the game jam, I didn't even place. In fact I doubt many people even tried the game as I neglected to 'sign' the app. By not signing the app I caused windows to think that it was a malicious, and wouldn't allow people to launch with out going through some rigmarole. 

I think the key take away from this game jam is that planning should be a key part of the development, not a quick tossed together thing. I have a bad habit of just jumping into things, and I think that this design document is perfect evidence of that. A proper plan would have made the game much better, and likely more fun. In the end I'm happy I made the game, and would go back to this game engine as I did create some rather useful tools for it. However I for sure will not be going in blind next time.

Here's the source to the game if you're interested: https://github.com/onesketchyguy/LetsBeATroll

Thank you for reading. I hope you learning something, and please feel free to share your insights in the comments.