So the Excit Project is pretty much wrapped up. I’ll post the link as soon as it is online. I’ll also might write a post-mortem on the old Excit soon.
In case you’ve been wondering what I was doing for the last few days, I can tell you right now pretty precisely, thanks to the excellent Simple Timer 2 Tool I introduced some time ago. There you go:
The blue and green boxes at the beginning is the work required just to make the game run. After that, I had a 1:1 copy of the old Excit running in Action Script 3.0. All it was lacking was ANY sort of user interface. So it was not possible to select levels, upload highscores, even reload the level or see how much moves you made. That’s what the big purple boxes in the middle are all about. Finally, the red-purple and teal boxes at the end are about bugfixing and little details like preloaders, little gimmicks for beating the game etc. Not tracked is the playtesting session at Thursday. Also not included is the level design because it was done by my colleague Daniel Renkel. Do you also track your Time, Daniel? I’m curious how much Time went into the project in total. Right now, I’m on 88 hours and 50 minutes excluding the playtesting.
I’m a bit baffled about how little time it required to make the game run and how much time went into the mundane interface stuff. It may be because the interface stuff is really boring and I’m less motivated so I work slower. Also I sure have a preference of working in the night. I do enjoy the darkness and the quietness of it. Still, it might be not healthy. o_O
So anyhow, with that one wrapped up, I’ll use the weekend to catch up with my E-Mails and the next week it’s finally back to Illucinated again. I’m excited!
all my work done in the week from tue, 18.nov to wed, 26.nov sums up to 54h:
2008-11-18, tue: 3h
2008-11-19, wed: 5h
2008-11-20, thu: 6h
2008-11-21, fri: 8h
2008-11-22, sat: 6h
2008-11-23, sun: 4h
2008-11-24, mon: 8h
2008-11-25, tue: 5h
2008-11-26, wed: 9h
due to the fact that i was also working at my day-job monday to thursday each week, i did similiar as krystian start work at 18'o clock and end it after midnight.
i did not track exactly how much time i used for each level, because i was jumping back and forth sometimes (making corrections, hints & wishes, adding different pickup positions, etc.)
due to the fact that i didn't add many new features in the level editor i also didn't keep track of that time separately.
but i believe adding xml export, some tracing option i needed for the solutions and some simple used-path-visualization took aprox. 8 hours.
designing the 30 levels did took me aprox. 6h, which leaves ~40h for the raw level-editing craftmanship. which is actually 25% better than my original assumption to need arround 2h per each level. which i actually believe to have only reached for a few of the more difficult and thus more complex levels.
krystian, if i wanted to argue with you (which i don't
i'd say that you did take more and more time for later work (purple, pink, cyan) simply because one isn't very effective when working that late.
>i'd say that you did take more and
>more time for later work (purple, >pink, cyan) simply because one >isn't very effective when working >that late.
You'd be wrong. The Data hardly supports that assumption.
What is "raw level-editing craftmanship"?