DDTe3 Final Thoughts

This was a really interesting episode to create, as the huge number of articles covering it’s creation clearly shows. Game-play wise, however, I am not as sure. While the individual games are enjoyable for a short-term play, I am not entirely sure there is a long-term play value to the games. To solve this problem, I plan on having a future puzzle gallery project which will let players select the picture to play with whichever game they are interested in. I would also like to add new features such as options to control how the grid is shown, and to give randomly generated images. Additional features such as game timers and move counters may also be added. I am really sure how long it will be before this enhanced version will be created (nor do I know how many releases it will take to get to the final version of the puzzle gallery game) but it is certainly something I will be working on.

Will I do another challenge like this again in the future? As the amount of time I have to devote to the Blazing Games site is being reduced in favour of larger scale games, such a challenge does make some sense. I think, however, if I do such a challenge again it would probably be done slightly different. What I think I would do is create a single game in a 16-24 hour period with as many bells and whistles as can be created within the time limit and then the following episode would add as many variations of the base game as can be created in a 24 hour development period. This would give me both the quality that I would like while also giving me a large number of releases. I would probably switch to a weekly release schedule while all the sub-episodes were released. If there were eight variants like there was for this release it would still result in a couple months for only a 24 hour work period which could be handy if a bigger project is heading into some type of crunch time.

Eight games in 24 hours is still quite impressive. A large reason that such a feat is possible has to do with how much software development tools and environments have improved. I suppose I would be able to develop a couple of games in under 24 hours using basic back when the Commodore 64 was my computer. Assembly language I would be lucky to finish a single game and then only if I was able to rely on code from earlier assembly language projects.

When you get right down to it, JavaScript is the basic of our time, with C++ being the modern equivalent to assembly language. While it is possible to still write in assembly language, the time requirements of writing in assembly language are simply not worth the speed and size benefits that it brings. I still think that it is worth learning assembly language if only to understand what the compiler is actually doing.