Postmortem: What'd've learn?

POSTMORTEM

Preface: The game was made in Godot.

This is the first game I've ever finished, and it's not perfect. But it is done. Here is what I've learned:

1. Finished is better than perfect

Rethinking every single step and trying to improve every single mechanic as it's being made is counter productive. Proper planning is a major part of game development, making sure to have the necessary systems and their interactions in mind is crucial, but in order to know what lies ahead, one first needs to go through and make some mistakes along the way. The mentality should be of iteration and improvement with each FINISHED project, not just a lot of ideas that get endlessly explored.

2. Sound design should be an early priority

This is somewhat technical, but when making entities for the game (the player character, enemies etc.), along with the animations and visuals, the sounds should be made too. It'll save a lot of time later down the road, because having to make sure everything has sound after an entire game has been made is a lot harder than simply adding the sounds immediately.

3. A VFX singleton is not necessary

This is specific to my implementation, where I had a singleton that played spawned particles when an enemy got hit. It would have been easier for every enemy to simply have a VFX node that received a signal from the health component when taking damage,

4. Knockback should be done with dedicated components, a giver and a reciever

The way I've done it ended up being a little clunky and uncontrolled, and it was a consequence of poor velocity control in the enemy AI. Having a dedicated knockback giver and knockback reciever node would have helped, but I'll find out if that is true the next time I need to implement knockback.

5. Layers are a friend

Using them for the player, enemies, projectiles and the ground was a good start, but it could have been expanded by adding a "knockback" layer for entities that can be knocked back, for example.

6. The player UI could have been in the player Scene

This is again specific to my project, but I could have just added the health and mana UI to the player scene, it would have been a lot more elegant.

7. General ideas and final thoughts:

In the future, I should make a better scene manager with better transitions, as well as a better options menu. The style of the UI should be controlled from a theme, and I should experiment with NinePatchRect as well. I'm happy that I've added an option to change controls and pretty proud that it works, even if all I did was follow a tutorial. For the longest time, I was stuck in a comfort zone of only making a player character move around and do stuff, but never touched the more "serious" things, like scene transitions, or reading and writing game state to memory. I had this idea in my mind that it was gonna be tough, like I forgot that making a state machine used to be hard for me and was now something perfectly comfortable.  This project has helped me grow quite a bit, and I'm happy that I made it. I'm also pretty pleased with the art style, and have received some kind words regarding it.

Most of all, people had fun playing it. That made me immensely happy. I've been developing it for so long and it became a bit of a struggle at the end, some part of me didn't think that it would be fun for anyone. When people actually did have fun with it, it lifted a huge weight off my chest. It wasn't in vain! There is meaning to this! I can do this! 

I hope you get some nugget of wisdom from this postmortem, it may not be my finest, but it is finished. I'll get better at writing them as I get better at making games.

Thank you for being here, and thank you for reading,

Biggie.