NES Trivia Postmortem

For my Blazing Games June game I am releasing my NES Trivia game even though I have not yet quite got to it in the blog. See the what went wrong section for the reason for this. Needless to say, here is the postmortem.

What Went Right

The string library that was developed for general purpose use worked really well. Especially when the macros were used. Lots of the display-related code is very easy to understand thanks to the use of the PrintStringAt macro. While the StrNCmp function was never used in the game, it will be used in the sequel so the code was not wasted, just slightly premature.

Mixed Blessings

The whole reason for this game was to actually create a simple game fairly early in the series. As it turned out, there was a lot more foundation work that I had to write about before I could get to the meat and have a real game. Even at this point there are things that could be improved. The biggest being randomness. Right after that (before that for many people) is sound. Filling up the extra ROM space with questions and touching up the display finish off my list.

What Went Wrong

This was not the game I was planning on releasing for June. I was going to hold off releasing the game until we actually started creating the game in this blog. Unfortunately, the game I was hoping to release for June simply was too large for the amount of time I had available (and my Dad going into the hospital for a hernia operation didn't help). Using this game as filler material was my only option. Sadly the game I was developing is going to be delayed by at least a month as there is a big RPG Maker contest in June. While I suspect there are people who are far more knowledgable about RPG Maker that will probably win, there are real prizes for this challenge and I did want to try out the tool so this will be my June project. If the resulting game got enough interest, and especially if it won money, I would probably shift my focus to developing a full version of that game.