I've left it quite late to wrap things up with the Week of Awesome, real life has been quite busy since the competition ended.

I've decided to shelve the small side projects I was working on and try to finish Orc Party to at least the vision I had for it at the beginning of the competition and further if possible.

The Competition

I really enjoyed the competition and will definitely take part again next year. I've come away from this with a confidence boost, I finished 16th out 24 but feel I did some great work and got some good feedback.

I've learnt a lot too from my mistakes, playable prototypes need to be made sooner. Get more direct feedback. Controls, instructions and tutorials are VERY important.

I held off on an interactive tutorial as I felt it would take too much time away from gameplay, I didn't even consider just flashing the controls on to the screen. This was problematic, several players missed huge parts of the gameplay that I was trying to make time for!

I have to get over my fear of LGPL licenses, I need to figure them out, how they interact with other licences. Trying to avoid one I needed for sound in my game, took me 4 hours with no results. I gave up on sound altogether, costing me valuable points.

I need to get a better idea of the size of my ideas. Orc Party was too big for a week at least what I wanted to do. This didnt give me the time to really pull the gameplay and theme together.

Orc Party

Like I said above, I'm going to continue with Orc Party. I hope to take just a couple of months to finish it up. I'll be working in the evenings only...

Heres a list of the extra things I'll be adding:

• Better, remappable controls, (several points were made about my control scheme...)
  
• On screen display of controls, then interactive tutorial.
  
• 3 Orc types (Warrior, Rogue, Shaman), instead of the 1.5 I had in the competition. Each will have positive and negative benefits.
  
• Enemy types, monsters, human adventurers.
  
• More environment elements to interact with. Water, bridges, magic, teleporters etc.
  
• Sound!
  
• More varied and fuller graphics, the levels were plain they need more going on. I will keep the current style though since I can actually create the art in that style.
  

This list isn't exhaustive and I've had some more ideas from the judges. I'll be starting with the controls, tutorial and sound. Once these are complete I will have a more complete playable build I can test with other people. Then I will flesh out the remaining gameplay and content in a hopefully solid direction.

Link to the final entry is in my previous journal entry, any more feedback is welcome.