Three Days of Night - postmortem

Here’s a quick report card on my game, TDoN.

Puzzles
Mostly I thought these came out okay. TDoN wasn’t terribly hard, but it wasn’t supposed ot be. There’s one with an awful typo bug (the prime number puzzle) that virtually cripples the whole puzzle.

Writing
Anything worth reading takes time to write, and I kind of dashed through the writing phase. It shows, unfortunetly.

Use of Theme
TDoN probably fails here. Only one ending reflects the wait until sunrise, and it’s not a happy one, necessarily.

Multiple endings
This is the one thing in this game I thought really works. I wanted the puzzles to lend themselves to different players, thus providing different endings. Three main endings can be achieved, and most people found only one. A few found two, I’m not sure anybody found all three.

Programming
I really like TADS. If TDoN is playable, it’s because TADS/Adv3Lite is an awesome system for writing games. That said, not all of the game scenery was as implemented/polished as it could be. The conversation with Mendelson could use a little more love too.

Conclusion
What I learned: Your game is horrible. You think it’s good enough to submit, but it’s not. It’s terrible, horrible, and ugly to boot. Your game is a writhing dumpster full of deformed maggots. Only beta-testing will beat the horribleness out of your game. Your game is so bad, it needs a minimum of three rounds of beta testing. More would only make it less terrible.

Making good games is hard. It takes a lot of determination, over an extended period of time, to make it good. I’ll probably make another game again (I’ve already got a finished game submitted to Spring Thing) but the next project is something I’ll have to be very passionate about.

Thanks to cvesletine for all the hard work in running ParserComp! Thanks also to Mike Roberts, Eric Eve, Kutopian, Steph Cherrywell. And thanks to all who played this game – I learned a lot from your feedback!