Oh, It’ll Be Out By….
Hmm, even now as I look back on what’s been done on Outwitters, I’ve learned a *ton* of new things in regards to game development. I’m not too excited about having only 1 game to release this year (if we even make *that*). Hell, we even planned on having 2 games a year. The take-away from that is game development is not an assembly line process. Going into Outwitters I:
- Never coded a turn-based strategy game before
- Never worked on an asynchronous game before
- Never worked with Google App Engine
- Didn’t use unit testing prior to this game
- Never worked with push notifications
- Never worked fully in C++ in a commercial project before
- Knew little of JSON and it’s benefits
- Hadn’t used Actionscript to the capacity that I am now
- Haven’t touched Python since freshmen year of college (omg I love python again)
- …and several others
Looking at just that list above, which isn't even scratching the surface, it was dumb to think I could predict *any* sort of release date prior to starting this project. Unless you're phoning it in game after game, or the game has a very small scope, or you just have many years of broad experience working on several different kinds of games, platforms, and genres, scheduling is almost silly to think about. Having only been doing this for a couple years, I'm far from the “broad experience” category. There are a few constants in game dev, such as getting your boiler plate code, foundation, or engine ready to go, or a super basic prototype up and running, but beyond that it's just a hazy mess for me at the moment.
The great thing is now I know a decent amount of everything on that list. If we were to do another asynchronous TBS game for iOS, scheduling would be far less hazy. But that's the dilemma. I sure as hell won't want to dive into another “Outwitters”-like project after this for a while. I get excited about new games and new ideas (most involving multiplayer to boot). I'm interested in things I haven't tried before, and as a result, they'll always be difficult to estimate length of development, but the challenge is what makes it fun for me. Even if we were to revisit a previous game and make a follow-up, I would want to add or change something about it that would make it unique, because that game is already a “solved problem” and is pretty much just grunt work from start to finish with little thought involved.
Outwitters Battle Report
This week I finished up implementing custom games into Outwitters. Outwitters was designed to be played with friends, so it's kind of weird having this feature come online so late in the game. Our Leagues and Ladders system works with 1v1, but we wanted to make sure to have 2 vs 2 in there as well so you can still take on the world with a buddy. Things are always more fun with a friend in tow :). Custom games are just a way for players to create their own games with their own settings. They can choose who is in the game, who is on what team, and the map. The league system tends to take over a lot of those choices to make things a bit more ‘standard'. Wins and losses don't count in custom games, so it's a nice place to try out strategies or just play with friends casually.
Speaking of leagues, the matchmaking and ranking system is finally online as well. It's not too interesting to look at yet since the player numbers are still very low. At least not my profile, since i have zero points and can't win a game to save my life. I'm apparently strategically challenged when it comes to these games. Probably explains my horrible performance in Starcraft 2. I tend to be impatient and like to throw my army away like lambs to the slaughter when the engagement heavily favors the opponent instead of me. Oh well, there's always Battlefield :D.