May Post-Mortem Roundup - Unknown Worlds

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May Post-Mortem Roundup - Unknown Worlds

Each month, Unknown Worlds hosts a 'Post-Mortem' at which game developers can come together to share knowledge and experience.

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Hugh

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Syknik

Tim Keenan was definitely very entertaining and I agreed with most of what he said.

Desther

Interesting videos!

ultranewb

Puzzles - Introduce, Train/Re-iterate, Challenge (aka The "Valve Way").

What the puzzle video is talking about it the Challenge stage. It's a familiar puzzle that's changed enough to require some new thinking. Unfortunately, the Anti-Chamber example was a terrible example since it was missing the Introduce mechanic. If you used the game mechanics that were both introduced and trained, you end up laboriously solving the puzzle. I hated that puzzle so much because of it. After looking at a youtube video of the trap-door method, I felt so cheated by the game.

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The "I wish I had Known" video can be summed up by looking up the Extreme Programming design tenet DoTheSimplestThing. This video is an anecdote for why this rule works, and works well. This work well in many disciplines, even something as simple as basic car repair.

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Naked Development. If you want an anti-example, go look at the Opera Desktop blog. They just released the first preview release of their web browser using Webkit rendering. As far as "blowing up", they got 5 times the responses they normally would get - almost all negative. The follow up post did, however, qualify things much better, but the damage is already done. Something so drastic deserves a little asterisk behind it at a minimum.