Here’s my gameplay video in case it’s needed: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1XPmaTvuUvJkmlsCLifvjY8NkicOeyT4Z. The assignment description says to put this in the blog, and then the guide for what to hand in says it should be in the zip with the artifact, so I’ll do both for safety (it also says the blog should be in pdf or doc form, which contradicts the places where it says it can be a blog and that links shouldn’t require permission to access).
I’m very happy with how the game turned out. 160000 poems is enough that I still don’t feel the levels have gotten repetitive despite much playtesting. There’s not a lot of big surprises seeing as all the words are revealed and set, but I still find the resulting poems delightful and fixing them up in my head compelling.
Mundane words weren’t really that relevant. They’re a different color and give more score, but without any random generation there’s not that much to do with them.
The random score is a bit tricky. I had the idea since we had a lecture on lying to players to give them the impression the game is more complex and interesting than it really is beneath the hood, but I can’t exactly advertise it as “the game reads your poem and rates it!!” and I think the assumption will be that it’s random or based on gameplay like how fast you get the next block after breaking one. I think it works fine to just have random score and never explain it, no matter what players assume, but I imagined it being a bit more possible to bait and make players believe it was something quite grand.
There’s no way to export poems. This was part of the feedback I got in class when I pitched it once, but I don’t really want the poems to stand on their own. They’re bound to the game, in all their imperfection. Sharing a screenshot, or sharing an edited/raw output of the resulting poem conveys something quite different, and I’d rather it remain within the context of the game. It also would take time and effort of course, and if I could do it really easily I might add it, but I think there is a good case for not doing it on top of the resource investment.
Programming the game had some hitches (Random as a float…) but once I got into the groove of it, it was as satisfying as ever to see the game evolve by my hand, and there wasn’t anything I wanted to implement that was too complicated. The random praise/scorn was a fun little bonus which spiced things up.
MA Dev Log 