Metris, Tetris and mutating known formulas

After sitting and waiting for the memories of the last Ludum Dare to fade a bit, especially the emotions, it's time to sit down and do some good, old-fashioned analysis on our game, Metris.  Metris is a mutation variant of Tetris, the classic block game.  Instead of the known formula of rotating shapes, we used morphing in place of it.  That was the core of our idea: morph the shapes in Tetris and use someone's existing codebase to kick off the jam a little faster than the last iterations.

We started the evening by brainstorming ideas until the two teams were decided: Our game, with two people working on it in Python, and the gobs of people working on the other game in Unity. It seems like my preferred language, Python, turns off quite a few developers.  Those not scared off by Python were not too enthusiastic about working on a Tetris clone.  Oh well, the game they came up with was good as well.

Once we had our game concept in mind, we found a code base to work from and started working on it.  At first, it seemed like the code we were using was good, but after a while, I found myself working on handling the edge cases that the original developer never bothered to handle.  I spent the entire first evening and most of the morning working on getting the edge cases under control.  Although it was a good lesson, I would have much rather have just spent some more time looking at code bases and not have dealt with the headache in the first place.  Lesson learned, I suppose.

I started feeling rather weathered as we entered the second evening.  Apparently I didn't avoid the cold that my significant other had brought home from work.  Despite that, I was still able to handle the rest of the edge cases in the code and get the game to run the way we wanted it to run.  I retired from working on the game early that night, knowing full well that the next day would be a mad rush yet again to get the game finished and polished.

We started doing the polishing phase once we started working on the final day of the jam.  We created a win condition, set up several levels for the game, and even got some music in as well!  Funnily enough, we started the day assuming that we would not be able to get music in for the game.  There just wasn't enough time to get both the polish in, along with working on the music.  In the final hours, Josh came in and wanted to do some audio for one of the groups.  Fortunately for us, the other group, which had seemingly absorbed any walk-ins, was at capacity when it came to audio people.  We sat him down for a quick playtest and some vague desires on what the game should sound like and we let him loose.  A mere hour later, he had music done and in the game for us.  Sweet!

Ok, now time for good, the bad and the ugly!

The Good:

• I got practice on working with a poorly documented, buggy code base other than my own.
• Metris has music!
• We got time to spend on polishing the game more than a few hours.  Consequently, the game was much more complete and looked better than the playable demo we had at the beginning.

The Bad:

• Not a lot of people joined us for creating this game.  This was not ideal, since there were over a dozen people working on the other one.  I think Unity has saturated the game development community.
• Getting sick.  Not much else to say about that.  Colds suck.

The Ugly:

•  My artwork.  Seriously, who let me do the artwork?  Oh, riiight.....

Ok, that's all for this segment.  At some point in the near future, I'll be taking a more formal look at the numbers and what the community had to say about the game.