| Hey all! I'm starting threads to give feedback to all of the entrants to this year's CCN Speedgame contest. Everyone did some good things this year, and I wanted to make some threads to give encouraging comments and constructive criticism. This week, I'll be making threads for 3 games each day, so as to hopefully not bump all of the other discussions off of the main page, and give everyone some daily-focused-feedback on their games. Feedback is an important part of the CCN contest, and I hope that we can give a big "thanks!" to our entrants by letting them know how they did! I don't think everyone should necessarily give numbered ratings like I did -- just some words of feedback and encouragement would be fantastic.
Trees of Doom (by Jestermax):
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Xian: 4 (Not much there, but still a nice and humourous take on the parable)
Fun: 5 (The combat was determined by pure chance, but it was still quite fun to watch Bob walk around the level -- he's so cute!)
Orig: 6 (A very funny and silly visualization of the story)
Gfx: 7 (I thought that the graphics were fantastically drawn -- I particularly enjoyed the "pop!" animation of Bob's arms at the beginning of combat, as well as muscular tree roots as stuck into the tennis shoes)
Stab: 6 (No crash bugs, though I did run into some collision-rect issues with TGB such that I got stuck in the lake and couldn't get out [I've dealt with this issue in the past, and I totally understand how much of an absolute pain it is])
Summary:
You'll help Bob the Gardener hunt down renegade trees in this exploration game. Fighting is done with classic turn-based combat in this short but visually appealing escapade.
Feedback:
Hey Jake! Good job getting the game done for the competition! Anyone can tell you that it's extremely hard to get a finished game done in just a week or two's time, especially when you're learning to use new tools!
I really liked the graphics that you drew for the game -- I take it you drew them yourself? It reminds me a lot of your Cactus-With-A-Taco style, and I was really impressed with your Rayman-style character. The muscular tree roots were visually fantastic, and I liked the sound effects as well. I would have liked to give you more points, but I docked you mainly for visual consistency (but in a 2 week project when working by yourself, there's not much you can do).
Especially I wanted to say great job on learning how to use a new tool for this project, especially something like TGB! Torque is a fantastic engine once you get used to its way of doing things, but when first getting up and running with it, it can be somewhat confusing as to what the right way to do things is. <flashback> Your game reminds me a *lot* of the first project that I created with TGB for last year's competition -- everything that I learned last year really helped me to utilize the engine to more of it's full potential this year </flashback> -- sorry for the detour, but I hope you can be encouraged by that. Seriously, if you look at my game from last year, it has a very similar feel, and it's just painfully obvious how uncomfortable I was with Torque. You at least seemed to get the hang of the scheduling system in Torque in order to make the turn-based combat, and that was quite smooth and impressive.
So with that, good job! I really hope you enjoyed the contest, and were able to use it as motivation to try something new and experiment. That's the whole point of these contests -- to give us a short (but complete) development cycle to give us experience in all aspects of a project's development, and help us force ourselves to just get a project finished and out the door (sortof the way class assignments help). All told, well done, Jake! Thanks for entering the contest -- I'm really glad you entered. 
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