SEMESTER END: August 18, 2023

Playtesting

Last time I said that I was done developing and that I would have people playtest my game. So I did, and here I'll briefly summarize what people have been saying about the game by touching on key points of feedback.

The game is fun!

I have been sweating bullets about this one. Granted I did have this game brewing in my head for quite a while, so I was fairly confident in it (whether or not that confidence has come back to bite me remains to be seen) but nothing can put your mind at ease when it comes to what people think of your work, no matter what. So yeah, when I handed my friends the link to play my game I was SO NERVOUS they would say it's not that fun, or that its just not engaging, or stuff like that. Of course, they're my friends, so they'll have bias for sure, but I pressed them to be as brutally honest as they could be, and I got some incredibly good feedback.

But overall the sentiment was that they thought the idea was awesome, and that the art was really cute! I could feel myself tearing up at some points, for sure - especially my one friend who happily played through the entire floor. No complaints or anything, he just enjoyed it and cleared every room. Thanks Quinlan, that made my month.

I had worked on this thing tirelessly for 4 grueling months. And when I wasn't working on it, I was thinking about it, non-stop. This thing essentially eclipsed my brain for the period that I worked on it. So to hear that people found it fun has been so unbelievably cathartic, like all my 4am nights have payed off :')

(Ok, only a select few nights were 4am nights - but I really did work on this thing for hours at a time)

Movement is CLUNKY

This one I knew from the beginning - the input for the game is not at all how I imagined it. I had put in placeholder code just to be able to have moving function, with the notion that I'd definitely come back to it and clean it up later. Well, later has come and I haven't really had it in me to go in, come up with a nice solution, and fix it up. I need a bit of a break, so I stuck to balancing and minor tweaks for the most part.

(So and so creature) feels bad to play as

This complaint was directed at Stakk, because he both didn't have a lot of tankiness like I intended, and bombs were a little tricky to use properly. I also hard-coded bombs to do 5 damage which was intended to be placeholder, but made it into the playable demo (oops). To that end, I made it so bombs didn't bounce anymore, and people seemed to like that change. I also raised creatures' base HP across the board, and raised all their stats.

No one is taking any damage!

Yeah... uhh, this one is fully my bad. Creatures were gaining 1 Defense per level, which doesn't sound like a lot, but when you put into context that creatures were also gaining 1 Strength per level, and that damage is calculated by the following:

Damage = (0.5*attacker.Strength + attack.BaseDamage) - (0.5*defender.Defense)

You can see why gaining 1 defense per level was resulting in extreme tankiness. Woops. I went ahead and switched out the defense scaling curves for the creatures so that they only gain 1 defense every 5 levels and that seemed to make things much better. I also raised attack's base damage values and feedback generally seems better.

The whole "turn" mechanic isn't super clear

This one was actually feedback I got from my girlfriend before I got to playtesting, which resulting in me adding those tutorial text tips from the last devlog. I think this helps a ton with clarity. I tried not to make the messages too invasive, as they're positioned at the top of rooms, plus you can just click them away. I noticed people started to catch on to the game flow much quicker after this change.

...

And that kind of summarizes playtesting! It was incredibly nerve-wracking to see people play this thing that I've spent 4 months in the hyperbolic time chamber with all of a sudden, but also incredibly exciting. It felt really cool to be in that developer position and say things like "yeah that move doesn't seem very balanced, I'll tweak the numbers." So cool! I'm just so glad it turned out well. But it wasn't without hiccups...

Post-mortem

What Went Right

I think a lot went right! I was super scared going in as a solo group, and even my professor / mentor was like "are you sure? that's crazy man, pshh, good luck". But, I tried to turn that fear into drive to learn something new, to push myself and make something cool. I was determined to show off both the artistic and logical sides of my brain. I wanted to blow people's minds on that last day of class. I wanted to show them that I could do this. 

Project Management - I think I nailed this part. Granted, it was substantially easier to do as a single person versus being in a group, but it's still just as easy to let yourself slip and not update your Trello boards. Regardless, I did a really good job at keeping my Trello updated, making relevant cards, due dates, moving things to the right columns, so on and so forth. This I felt really help keep me on track and get a good sense for how much I've done, and how much was left. And look at that, I was able to finish development with a week of class left! I think that's testament enough to the fact that I ended up managing myself pretty well.

Learning Unity and C# - Again, not knowing any Unity or C# going into this had me nervous big time. But it ended up being a much more enjoyable experience than I thought it would be. I picked up on concepts much quicker than I thought, and what I thought was forgotten knowledge from my degree instantly showed itself again. Plus, it was fun! I was having fun learning again, which I never thought would happen again. It was a great feeling, and that process of learning itself would feed into the adrenaline of working on the game and cause me to keep learning and working more.

Having a support group - This might be overlooked by some, but I cannot stress enough how important this is. There were plenty of days where I felt like giving up, like my game would turn out horrible, and that I made a big mistake going solo. But what kept me going was having people around me that love me and were willing to listen to me talk about my silly game. So I wanted to say a very special thank you to all my friends and family who were willing to let me show you mid-development progress demos, who were willing to listen to me ramble about that one annoying bug with the bomb, who would share in my excitement when I added a cool new thing. Seriously, thank you so much. Especially to my wonderful girlfriend. Thanks to her help, I was really able to focus up in the last few weeks of development and make insane progress.

Version Control - Shouldn't be surprising given my background, but the git repository was good and everything was great on that front.

Closing the Game Loop - I think I'm finding this is one of the hardest things to do when it comes to making a game. Getting the game to a point where there's a beginning, middle, and end is surprisingly really difficult. I think I learned the importance of getting that loop in as early as possible, since if you have the beginning and end of the game figured out and in place, you can pad the middle with as much content as you want.

Art Direction - I think I did have my doubts going in that I would be able to draw / animate well enough to make a cohesive game world with cute creatures. But again, similar to what happened with learning Unity and C#, seeing my rapid progress & improvement in my art made me want to draw more! Plus, everyone complimenting the art style in the playtests was a huge sigh of relief. I am incredibly proud of the art I created for this game, and never in a million years thought that my skill level would reach this point.

What Went Wrong

Project Scope - Yeah, duh. Every teacher in my program would say things like "whatever you scope your game to be, cut it in half" and I was always like "pff, nah, I can scope things perfectly!"... Nope. I can't! Even though I thought my game was significantly smaller than the games we tried to work on our last semester, it still felt too big. I had to cut a bunch of content that I would have loved to see in action, which really sucks. But at the same time it took a significant load off my back and helped me keep my flame burning.

Keeping the codebase clean - This one was hard to control. I felt like I was doing a great job early on, but as the deadline approached, I started taking more shortcuts because there were still so many things that needed to be added. There was a lot of duplicate code, a lot of code structures that I would totally rewrite / redesign, bug after bug near the end, bandaid fixes, and so on. What I will say though is that now when I encounter similar problems in the future, I'll know exactly what not to do and make a better effort to keep my code maintainable.

Iteration - This was also a problem I had with the past George Brown game project. I didn't feel like I had a lot of time to experiment with where the fun of the game was, but I think this game was a bit of a unique case. It's a turn-based kind of game that's built on a lot of core systems. These systems themselves took plenty of time to implement so it didn't really give me a lot of breathing room. I would have like to have more time to mess around and try things with a prototype, but I was so stubborn to start writing code and building systems that I didn't afford myself that time.

Making Design Decisions as I Go - I did come up with a rough Game Design Document early on, but there were still a lot of things up in the air. I just told myself "eh, I'll figure it out when I get there". But there were a lot of moments where I wish I had spent more time designing, especially when it comes to UI, creature stats, stat interactions, and attacks. I think if I did this better earlier on I would have had more content to show in the form of creatures, attacks, and game feedback.

Work/Life Balance - This might have been the most difficult challenge on this whole list. I had basically resigned to focusing a vast majority of my time over the past 4 months to this game. And that is what ended up happening. I would spend less time with the people I love and care about because I wanted to add this one new thing or fix this one new bug. And I think that is a big mistake. I would work such long sessions on this thing, by the time I was done it would be like 8-9 PM and I'd eat dinner super late. Plus my parents were retiring and leaving to their home country for a well-earned rest for a good long while, so I didn't even get to spend as much time with them as I wanted to before they left... I guess I can chalk that up to just "how school is", but I think the onus is also on me for just not spreading out my working hours, or budgeting my work time better so I could allow myself some much-needed rest time. I will not be making this mistake in the future, most definitely.

Conclusion

Overall, I have to say that this was an incredibly eye-opening and enriching experience. I got to get a glimpse into what solo development life is like, and got to take part in every step of the game creation process, just like I wanted when I first set out to do this thing. I learned so so much over these past 4 months, about art, and programming, and most importantly, myself. I did at some points wish I had at least 1 other person on my team, but as a solo dev I like to think I did a pretty good job for what I had set out to do.

I am so glad to have had this experience, and to have had a cool chill mentor throughout the whole thing. It has been my pleasure.

I'd like to say one big thank you to all the tutorial creators I referenced: Code Monkey, Mina Pêcheux, AdamCYounis, for taking time to create such thorough and high-quality tutorials. AdamCYounis in particular has served as a huge source of inspiration, as he is also a solo developer + artist who is working on his own game. In times where it felt impossible or tough I would watch his videos to help motivate myself.

I'd also like to thank George Brown College for giving me the opportunity to work on a project like this. The staff have been incredibly friendly and helpful.

And finally, thank you to my friends, for keeping me company in Discord calls while I was silently working.

Thank you to my parents for giving me all these opportunities to try new things and for being wonderfully supportive to me.

And thank you, to my girlfriend. For believing in me and keeping me going when things got hard over the past 4 months. I don't know what I'd do without you.

With that, I'm finally finished. I'll be putting the game live here, on itch.io, right now. Please give it a try and let me know what you think :)

Thank you for reading.

Until next time,

-Arda