Pyweek 6 Postmortem : "gather"

wow, I'm honored and humbled by the responses to "gather". I had fun and will definitely be back. The pyweek upload system is giving me trouble, so if you want the most recent versions of the game (the post-pyweek release) at my personal site.


src : http://static.adambachman.org/games/gather-2008-04-24_src.zip

Windows .exe : http://static.adambachman.org/games/gather-2008-04-24.zip

On with the postmortem...

What I think went right:

• All sound and graphics were from somewhere else. Besides some minor tweaking to shrink file sizes (cutting music into smaller loopable chunks and increasing compression), I didn't have to do anything to make the media work. That saved a ton of time for tweaking gameplay.
• Start with big ideas, cut mercilessly. This was originally going to be an RPG/story based game with a sci-fi story running through everything. Didn't happen. There was going to be flocking, heatmaps, procedural content and other complex algorithmic stuff, but I found that I didn't have the chops to bring it together in one week. So I cut everything that wasn't necessary for playing and added back just enough to make it finished. I was *this* close to ignoring levels, score keeping, and the whole little HUD thing, but managed to slip them in on Friday.
• Standing on the shoulders of giants. From the first moment I opened my editor, pygame and the Splush package meant I could see something happening. I'd never used the pygame Sprite library before this week, but it came easily once I got started. Not having to ever worry about collision algorithms alone was worth the learning curve. Feedback is key keeping up my motivation, so being able to rely on other people's tools meant almost all my own changes were high level, substantive changes that actually effected the way the game played instead of rewriting a framework.
• Polish. Little changes add together for big effects. Little changes are also easier to get right than big changes. Most of Friday and Saturday were spent polishing. Please note, with only one week to design and develop, I consider bugfixes to be polish.

What needs improvement:

• Barking up the wrong tree. Wednesday was a total day off, no game code touched, because I almost burned myself out Tuesday trying to lever a trigonometry based flocking algorithm into an 8-way movement system. On top of the fact that I've never written boids code, I tried to retrofit it into what I already had. This resulted in pretty much a day and a half wasted. I could've been more merciless.
• No practice or preparation. I promised myself I would try writing a game in the weeks leading up to pyweek. FAIL. This didn't kill me in the week of the comp, but it meant I had to learn as I went. Related to this, I would've liked to figure out in advance what I could rip out of Splush to avoid mental clutter. In general, I wish my tool use abilities had been a little more honed getting into the week of coding.

All said and done, I enjoyed it making and playing the game, and I'm glad some other folks did too. I hope to do a small set of tutorials while pulling the game apart and re-writing most of it. At this point I can't imagine adding features without coming at it fresh. I think there's potential here, but I don't envision turning this into a power-up heavy 2D action shooter. I like the design constraints of a five-minute casual shooter, so I think whatever changes, it'll still be pretty much the same game.

Huge thanks to Richard and everyone else involved for keeping pyweek rolling, I look forward to 7!

pyweek 6, success.

I got second place in the individual developer category. I'm surprised and humbled, also excited. This feels validating and I hope to keep writing games.

You can check out the official site from the competition at: http://pyweek.org/e/energized/. If you're running Windows and don't want to mess with the source code, you can get a zip file at http://static.adambachman.org/games/gather_2008-04-21.zip. Please drop me a line if it doesn't work (and you really want to play it).

Enough folks liked it that I think I'll keep working on filling out the game play a bit, too. I don't think there's much more that I want to see added. It's a simple one-concept type of game and lots of powerups/weapons/bad guys would probably just be clutter.

Onwards and upwards!

Starting Investing

We're going to start putting some of our savings in something with a better chance of growth than our 1% savings account. It's reassuring to see that the richest man on earth recommends the same strategy I was going to follow anyways.

From the article:"What Warren Thinks"

What advice would you give to someone who is not a professional investor? Where should they put their money?

Well, if they're not going to be an active investor - and very few should try to do that - then they should just stay with index funds. Any low-cost index fund. And they should buy it over time. They're not going to be able to pick the right price and the right time. What they want to do is avoid the wrong price and wrong stock. You just make sure you own a piece of American business, and you don't buy all at one time.

What should we say to investors now?

The answer is you don't want investors to think that what they read today is important in terms of their investment strategy. Their investment strategy should factor in that (a) if you knew what was going to happen in the economy, you still wouldn't necessarily know what was going to happen in the stock market. And (b) they can't pick stocks that are better than average. Stocks are a good thing to own over time. There's only two things you can do wrong: You can buy the wrong ones, and you can buy or sell them at the wrong time. And the truth is you never need to sell them, basically. But they could buy a cross section of American industry, and if a cross section of American industry doesn't work, certainly trying to pick the little beauties here and there isn't going to work either. Then they just have to worry about getting greedy. You know, I always say you should get greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy. But that's too much to expect. Of course, you shouldn't get greedy when others get greedy and fearful when others get fearful. At a minimum, try to stay away from that.

But you're still bullish about the U.S. for the long term?

The American economy is going to do fine. But it won't do fine every year and every week and every month. I mean, if you don't believe that, forget about buying stocks anyway. But it stands to reason. I mean, we get more productive every year, you know. It's a positive-sum game, long term. And the only way an investor can get killed is by high fees or by trying to outsmart the market.