Y’know, there was something nagging me… and this is it! i meant to produce a quick postmortem for every completed Illogistix product but didn’t get around to it with Quantizer. So here it is, just a quick couple of paragraphs of what passes for thought.

What went right?
Since the objective with Quantizer was to write a simple, fun shoot ‘em up with an online scoring system to see how busy these things can get, generally speaking the entire project went pretty much as i’d planned; it could probably have been more popular (at the time of writing, the online scores appear to have “stalled” at 198 plays) but for the short term at least a few players have enjoyed it and some of the scores Fossil has dragged out of the thing have been rather impressive.

What went wrong?
Nothing actually went wrong as such, although the overall design could probably have been something deeper or at the least allow for more variety. A few people at the Shmups.com forums complained that the scoring was “broken” although it was a deliberate design choice on my part, mainly because it amused me to think of people trying to avoid actually killing about a third of the nasties in order to milk them for score!

What was learnt along the way?
Well, along with some odds and sods of online score programming (or more accurately, honing what already existed in a very rough form until it worked correctly), i did learn quite a bit of useful information about shoot ‘em ups from Fossil, in particular about drawing order of objects and so forth. There’s also the issue of the multiplier and scoring system, that needs a lot more future investigation i think…

Final thoughts
All told i’m still rather pleased with Quantizer, it might be a very simple project but the result worked out pretty well all things considered.