Masters of Influence Post Mortem (and current project)

One of the hardest parts at the end of this project was coming up with the name. It may seem trivial, but it's an indicator something that I'm still in the process of learning: understand completely what you are trying to do before you begin it. There are of course ups and downs, and a million little things to pick out and understand as the project goes ahead, but I spent so much time trying to make my game match my engine as much as the other way around that it was twice as hard as it could be.

But really? I'm very happy with the product.

GOOD STUFF
1) It looks fun, plays well and is entertaining. Designed from scratch with a modified version of Catan in mind, I think it turned out well.

2) Music. What a difference that makes. While I left it off in the chess game because it was important to me that the person could concentrate, making it available if the user desires is a pretty good thing.
3) Designing and doing my own artwork - exhausting to learn, and massively time consuming, but it turned out well. The last several years of tooling around for the very basics in 3DS Max came home to roost and help out.
4) Quick, large scale, and simple AI. Using the board-copy A* procedure from the chess game was infeasible for some of the size boards I used. Therefore, I used a simple board analysis with weights associated to current and desired possessions. Quick, simple and sort of effective.

BAD STUFF
1) Knowing what I was trying to accomplish. It started as a mix of Catan and Civilization, then became Stratego, then back to Catan, and so on. All during engine development. It adds to the stress, it adds to the overhead, and it detracts from the final experience. Get down, in design documents, WHAT YOU WANT TO DO.
2) No save games and no multiplayer. By the time I started learning about online play, it was too late for my game to be modified to fit - I tried, trust me, but I don't have an internet connection and actually travel to test on the XBox, so after making a few attempts to bring it online, I gave up. Same with save games. I'm glad to announce I've created working online demos and my current project uses a very sophisticated save game system, but this game could have truly benefited from it.
3) The AI could have been improved. As it stands, it's a moderate challenge, especially on smaller boards, but there could have been a better analysis.
4) Don't release the weekend Skyrim/Zelda/Mario are released, right after BF3 and MW3...

OVERALL
It was close to what I wanted, a good technical challenge (such as PCF shading with instanced geometry and patch updating the tile statuses), but I wish it were more deep and complex. That's part of the challenge of being a solo developer - big time games take bigger teams.

SALES

(that's right, 1000 :) )

I'll give some details on that engine soon, as well as screenshots and details of my current project - it's a first person mystery, taking place in a single Victorian house!