http://www.idevgames.com/articles/z1-postmortem

We took second place in art and story. Not a bad showing.

Well, the voting is officially underway. http://www.udevgames.com/entries/210

That was a lot of work and a lot of fun. I feel like we made a pretty good game. There are a few things I wish I could have improved, but I think we got something out there that we can be proud of.

The next steps are to polish the game up a little, add some levels to flesh out the story and then release it on the app store.

I’m going to write my part of the postmortem here, and Carlos can write his and we can splice them together into one.

The first two levels are pretty much done. We could tweak them to death to make them better, but don’t have the time. I added the ability to have a ship that you escort, it follows behind as much as it can. I need to do some math when it transitions between 0º and 360º but that should be simple when I’m a little less tired.

I was also able to add the dialog screens to the end of the level. Carlos really wanted to do that, and it was a little more work, but it works well.

Other than doing the levels, we are pretty ready to let this baby get voted on. But the levels are a big deal. Here’s to sleeping a week straight once the contest is over.

Gameplay, just to give an idea

Screenshot of part of the opening dialog

I’ve got the main part of the menu screen refactor done. I can’t figure out why I’m not getting mouseMoved events so I can do the hover image for the buttons. I’ll save tracking that down for later. Now, I’m going to use that work to make the credits screen less sucktacular.

I added more music from Carlos, it sounds good and changes the feel of the game. I’ve added in the placeholder levels that Carlos generated, and made the 2nd level less “douche-y” as Skyhawk calls it.

I have a busy day at work, but I hope to make some progress tonight and on the bus to and from.

I want to work on the levels, but I think I need Carlos to fill in the story to make the levels work.

From the feedback we’ve gotten so far, it is apparent that I will have to completely refactor the menu screen code. I was relying on the cocos2d menu stuff to handle all the interaction because it was simple and it matched what we used to do with menus and transitions and screens… with the changes I just made to match the comps, that is no longer the case.

It’s going to set me way back, time wise, but it’s the only way to get the polish up to an acceptable level. There is some implied interaction with the new model that just can’t be handled with the standard cocos2d menus.

I worry that I’m doing polish at the expense of gameplay.

Z1 icon

Here’s an unofficial list of what I have left to do:

• Create some more enemy animations for use in levels
• Finish up the finish game screen
• Bug Carlos to get music for menu screen and some more music for levels
• Update the pre-level cutscenes to something not quite so sucky
• Fix the credits screen to not be so pathological
• Create 10 levels. I’m assuming Carlos will do the story and scripts and both of us will work on the actual gameplay of the levels.
• Get some sleep

I’ve posted what I have now at http://udevgames.s3.amazonaws.com/entries/Z1.zip