The Post-Mortem for my entry, “Finish Your Project“.

When I started out, I spent about 4 1/2 to 5 hours working on a puzzle game.  I actually managed to make it playable, until I realized that (a) the game was boring and repetetive, (b) it didn’t really have an attainable goal, and (c) it didn’t have a clear way to ‘lose’.  Rather than try to fix it, I scrapped the whole project and with with plan B, which was “Finish Your Project”.

THINGS THAT WENT WELL:

• Animation!  I’m usually terrible when it comes to graphics, but I was super-impressed with how well I managed to make the game look this time around.  I’m really starting to get the hang of the animator in Unity, and though I know I made some mistakes with it or did things inefficiently, I ultimately achieved exactly the look I was going for.  I learned a LOT on this one, and it’s gotten me excited about future projects (not just LD ones, but normal ones as well).
• Music went well, as always.  My last three LD projects have had music that changes to match what’s going on in the game, and I’m beginning to realize this is becoming a theme with me.  I’m also beginning to realize that I’m perfectly okay with that. ^^
• While the gameplay is ultimately repetitive, it does exactly what it’s supposed to do: convey the monotony of the situation that the main character is in.  I added a few random elements to add some variety, but for the most part it becomes ‘same @#$% different day’, which is what I was aiming for.
• For once, I squashed all of the obvious bugs before uploading.  There’s still one weird animation glitch, but it happens so rarely that you pretty much have to be trying to get it to run into it.  The gameplay runs perfectly though.
• It’s kind of a shame that most of the people playing it won’t get to see the ending, but I realize there are a lot of LD games out there, so spending what is typically around 30 – 45 minutes completing this one seems unreasonable.  I actually really like how it ends though, because I like to think it’s unexpected.

THINGS THAT NEEDED IMPROVEMENT:

• I learned a lot about the animator in Unity, but I also learned there’s a lot for me still to learn.  I know there’s a way to mirror animations left to right, and I just didn’t feel like I had time to figure out how to use it properly, so instead I just made separate animations for facing left and right.  This almost broke the game, because switching to these animations caused a weird “Paper Mario” effect where it would flip in 2D fashion.  I eventually found a way to correct the problem, but it told me there was a better way I could have done this.
• I should have had some kind of visual indicator of the areas on the screen you can click on, or some indication that you clicked on them.  The method I was going to use initially ended up not working right due to the way sprites are drawn in layers.  I came up with a solution but ran out of time to implement it.  At the very least, I should have had a sound effect to show you successfully clicked.  Which brings me to…
• No sound effects.  Up until the very end I was up in the air as to whether or not to have sound effects included, and ultimately decided not to include any; I felt the music and actions tell the story well enough.  Part of me still thinks I should have included some, though.
• More random events would have been nice, and might have also made it easier to keep the player engaged for the full length of the game.  I just couldn’t think of any to put in that would (a) make sense in the game’s “story”, or (b) didn’t require a lot of extra work that might have run me over on time.
• As mentioned before, it’s a shame most people won’t see the ending.  I thought it was clever, but maybe it’s just me.  It’s the risk I ran for making a game that takes so long to beat, in a setting where people want to move on to the next game ASAP.  Ah well.

On to future projects!