It’s complete. I’m not satisfied with the balance or the feel, but Hot Potato is finished and submitted.
Oh. I should rebuild it on my Debian system since other people tend to have problems playing my game when I build a project on my Ubuntu system I might make a Windows port soon, but after 72 hours, I’m beat. I’ll update this post when I get those two things done.
Updated! I created the Windows port, and I rebuilt the game on my Debian system so that a wider variety of Linux-based systems should just work out of the box.
You can download it for:
– GNU/Linux (1.6MB tar.gz)
– Windows (3.12MB .zip)
3 replies on “LD20: Hot Potato is Finished”
Nice work! I don’t expect that you’re too keen on refining the code/gameplay at this point, but I thought I’d leave a couple thoughts in case they were useful for the future. Feel free to disregard them and slap me with a fish for completely missing the point of a 72-hour game.
The only technical glitch I noticed was that mouse clicks didn’t always seem to register. Not sure why that would be, if you’re checking all the SDL events being queued, but… well, I guess that’s why I don’t program much.
You explained the basic rules pretty clearly in the README, but there was one rule that I discovered in-game that made it rather difficult, and that is that you *must* move every piece if possible. As soon as I shoved the courier once, it seemed impossible to align the pieces back up so that could do it again. I don’t usually play these kinds of games anyway, though, so perhaps that’s my problem. 🙂
All in all, that’s an admirable effort for something that took only 72 hours! Congrats on getting it finished!
Thanks for the feedback, Clean3d!
Regarding mouse clicks: My UI is based on IMGUI, so the buttons aren’t processed by events. It unfortunately requires a constant fps, and since I don’t explicitly make sure I’m running at a constant fps, that is why it isn’t so consistent. I think what I need to do is not check the current mouse state but check a buffer of events each frame. That way, clicks get processed each time and not if they happen to occur during the button update call. It’s a problem in “Stop That Hero!” as well, which makes sense since “Hot Potato”‘s UI code is stolen from “STH!”.
Regarding the rules: You’re right, I forgot to mention that requirement. Also, the only reason it is a requirement is because I was trying to get a game finished by the end, and making it possible to end a turn prematurely was lower on the priority list. B-)
While it isn’t impossible to get the couriers lined up again, I agree that it is way too difficult for this game. If I was interested in working on it more, the first thing I’d change is to provide some way for the player to decide that he/she doesn’t want to move or shove on a given turn. It should be a lot easier to be strategic with your courier placement and wait for pedestrians to be in the right place.
The important thing for me is that it was finished. One of these days I’ll finish an LD with a winning entry. B-)
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