HexChess 360: Post Mortem

Well, that was fun! When I was trying to write my first game for publication, I couldn't come up with a solid, saleable idea that was simple enough to implement - so I took chess! A finished ruleset, a concept people are at least familiar with, it seemed a good idea and I am happy with the results. The code in previous posts is nowhere near what I ended up with, but moving forward, this will be more up to date!

HexChess 360

GOOD STUFF
1) A game, from start to finish, is a lot more work than one would think - from modeling and texturing, to managing input, to AI research and implemenation, to the menus and options.But doing it all was a ton of fun and a great learning experience.
2) I really got to understand the nitty-gritty of MinMax and AB pruning - boy, did I ever, and the learning curve dropoff from impossible to easy is astounding.
3) I learned TONS of optimization tricks, from 1D array usage, to internals, to garbage collection and  function management. Lots of this will come in handy in the future.
4) I learned a new game and had fun :)

BAD STUFF
1) It took a lot of time to get this far, and a lot out of me to have to work every evening on every aspect of the game. Next time, I'm going to try to space out the work with some other people.
2) There were a lot of  kinks to manage when moving from a PC to the XBox - how to handle user input, how much slower the XBox processor is (expecially with memory restrictions of my AB searching) compared to an i7, how to handle user elements within the 10% screen restrictions... these need to be considered from the START and a lot of it comes with experience.

OVERALL
 A great project and a great time. Obviously tough at some times, but a product that at least 540 people have liked enough to spend 80 points on. There have been some complaints about the user input (understandable), the AI search time (restricted as best I could) and the lack of music (which was purposefully left out, as I thought a chess game could use some silence), but overall, a good rating on XBL Indies.

Sales:

My next project, another board game, is underway now and has been for a few weeks. New updates soon!