The History
On the Summer Break of 2011, I was working on the SeiON sound engine and the High Score of Archer Fish.
The High Score system would come with achievements for completing various parts of the Game. Some of them were standard, like a Star for finishing each round of the game or achieving a score of 9999. Some were challenges, like shooting down 20 Flies from behind. Others were silly, like not having eaten a single Fly throughout all 9 stages of the game. All of these Achievements required the user to play through the game in one sitting, or restart from round 1.
Users could choose to use their DeviantART id to sign their name in the high score table. If using DeviantART id, their deviantART avatar would be fetched from dA and displayed in the high score table.
Users will be ranked by day, week, month, all-time. They can be sorted by raw score, or by achievements.
The High Score Table would be powered by MochiScores. The high score is 13 digit number encoded with a 6 digit numeral score and several boolean values representing the status of achievements.
I wasn’t able to finish it before school started and me taking a 4 month long hiatus. But at the end of those months, I was ready to stop development there and then, and prepare to release Archer Fish. Why?
Taking Far Too Long
I have been working on Archer Fish since 2003. Surely doing it into 2012 wasn’t that much of an issue?
Thing is, 8 years is far too long that I’m not longer passionate about the game. I do get a sense of passion and pride when I fire up the game and play it – it looks incredible.
That said, looking so incredible as it is already, I feel that my work here is done. The core gameplay has already been refined, everything, yes everything, is finished. To be bogged down by a High Score component that was growing over 3000 lines of code (the core game was only 10,000 lines) with no end in sight was ridiculous. Enough is enough.
Marginal Worth
While achievements do enhance gameplay, their worth lies in a sense of accomplishment. A high score table allows them to flaunt it. But the achievements are either unremarkable, or ridiculously hard. I could weed it down to a few, but then the achievements would also feel too insubstantial for the effort needed.
Moreover, is my game going to have that many players? It would be embarrassing to have a High Score Table with very few entries. This is especially glaring in the Daily/Weekly score sections.
Pity
I already deleted the High Score component from my harddisk, but it is a pity in a way. I spent quite a lot of time developing the images and the code, and it seems a waste to delete it. What I regret though, is that I ever decided to make a high score component. It was such a pain. I think what I took away, was a new respect for those who do interface design and backend, in raw code of course, without an interface layout manager. That’s what I did. Unconventional, but I think there isn’t much choice when dealing with interfaces in games.
Cardin is a self-taught Game Programmer, Fingerstyle Guitarist, Digital Artist. Admittedly he's not very good at either of those things though.
