Pyweek 14: Mad Science

So we've reached the end of another pyweek, and managed yet another game ("Tomorrow, the World!!!"), so it's time for my usual post-pyweek post.

It's not one of the better entires I've been involved in, and I expect us to place very middle of the field this year. I think there's a decent concept here, but we didn't get enough content or game balance to have something that's really fun, and, as a result, much of the early game is a bit random and frustrating. There's nothing unfixable, but it needs a couple of days of people playing and extending the game to get to the point I'd actually be happy with it. It's got its entertaining bits, though, so I'm happy enough to throw it out there to be judged and see what happens.

Due to everyone being busy and / or being out of the country, we had a much smaller team than previous entries. I expected we would need to downscale as a result, but this proved to be more of a problem than I had actually anticipated. There just wasn't space for people to play the game much, which partly accounts for the issues, and there also much less opportunity to riff off other people's ideas to improve things. Everyone being busy in the day didn't help either. There were far fewer of the "ooh, a bunch of cool stuff has happened since I last worked on the game" moments, which also made it feel like more of a slog than past entries. The lack of people was most felt in the final Saturday finishing sprint, for which only 2 of us were available - most conversations were "I'm fixing X, can you look at Y?", and then silence for about 30 minutes while stuff happened. Given how the smaller team affected things, my respect for people doing successful solo entries has gone up even further.

I've now been involved 5 pyweek entries, and they've all been content heavy in various ways, so it's fair to call that as a definite trend. Given the games I enjoy playing, and the high value I place on being amusing, that's not surprising, but it's not a good feature for games with small teams.

On the upside, it was still fun. Coding for pyweek is always liberating, since it's much more important to have something close now than completely correct later. Having now done 3 pyweeks with mercurial, we've now also got the setup and workflow around that reasonably well sorted (which means we're almost certainly due to change to something else now), and past experience means that we're making a reasonable number correct design decisions early, so I'm quite happy with the final structure of the game.