4k Flash Game Post Mortems
4kPillars story.
I always wanted to play something that was enjoyable and relaxing at the same time and I had this vision of this 3d spaceship wandering in my head for some time. The 4k competition showed me the way to translate my vision into code. Was it possible to squize a 3d engine in less than 4k? Yes, it was absolutely possible, but I just didn’t know yet. I remembered I saw a nice spaceship on a 3d tutorial by Kirupa, so I went for it and… WHAT???! A full 3d rotating spaceship placed on a starfield in just 1.946 bytes? That was amazing and started working on it. Modified ship and colors to suits my vision, added shapes to build obstacles, added a rounded world, added a nice shadow and placed all this in the magic formula of the focal lenght and yes, what once was in my mind, was actually beginning to show in front of my eyes.
What went right?
The luck of finding Kirupa’s spaceship gave me the right enthusiasm to start in the right way. In less than one day of work I had my spaceship moving in the world with the perspective and smooth movements I wanted. And bytes used were rising very slowly. When it was the time to add challenge to the flight experience I thought that would be the most difficult part. The algorithm that randomly generated obstacles was instead quite easy to write, and surprisingly so was the checking collision system. Enthusiasm was growing and I was coding happily when I suddenly ran out of space.
So, what went wrong?
The 4k limit was the only thing I wasn’t bothering, so, when I had to throw away my beautiful particle system, I was throwing away a piece of my heart. Marvellous particles were sparkling all over the area when hitting pillars with the spaceship and the world beautifully colored with dynamic gradients instead of flat colors was giving the emotions I was after. Removing all those things and also the dynamic changing of levels made me doubtful on the enjoyability of my game. I thought it was quite boring without those eye-candies and I wasn’t happy with it at all. I managed to color the background so that it wasn’t blank anymore and (don’t know how) I managed to add a multy purpose text area showing score and what to do to restart the game. I hadn’t room for the code to keep the text in the foreground so it is covered by tall pillars. This text area saved my feeling with the game giving more a sense of completeness. I’m sure I could have squized the code in less bytes but I was tired to work on a mutilated project, so I kept things as they were…
I’m also sure that if I stopped at 4k without going forward than backward I would have achieved a better result.
Never let decay your love with your projects!
Some pictures:
My “vision”: sketched
My “vision”: mutilated
My “vision”: original version and a two player version with sparkles!!!
