Game Postmortem

What was the most challenging part of the creation process?

M: Probably keeping everything straightforward in my head. Last jam I kept a notepad next to me so I could keep track of things I needed to do and draw diagrams and such. Recently, I lost that notepad so I didn't have it this time. That set my focus back a bit I feel and made some things a little redundant. I feel like as a programmer, I'm always trying to come up with ways to cut redundancies and make everything as tight as possible. But I also rarely take the time to see them through because I feel like I need to get things done quickly so I'll go with my first thought and, somewhere along the way, I think of a different way, but at that point, I'm too immeshed with the current situation.

V: As always debugging. Errors are "easy" to find and triage but actually finding where the non-error bugs are and fix them is a whole other process.

E: The most challenging part for me was staying focused on animations. I don’t feel as confident with characters and action sequences. This project was a great way for me to improve my ability to animate a characters doing various things. I had a hard time sticking with a system for animating the player. I also had some challenges with GitHub.

What was the most fun?

M: It's always getting to a point where something works and is somewhat playable. Also, anytime I'm able to squash a bug on my first guess. Other than that, I'm really looking forward to the audio. We didn't have time to get to it during the jam so we're going to do it all the day after. 

V: For me, it was the part where I took an established pattern and (somewhat) implemented it in our game. It just makes me hopeful for making our code in the future even more modular and clean.

E: My two favorite things about this project were creating atmosphere in the world, and getting to see my animations come to life so quickly in the game engine. I was more organized with my files than the last project, so finding the pixel art I needed to work on was generally a breeze.

What didn't work the way you thought it would?

M: I thought we'd have time to make some audio. I even turned down an audio dev before the jam (felt stupid at the end). I'm glad we will still get to put it in, being such a story driven game. 

V: I thought I'd have more capacity for making richer dialogues. I am happy we still have some prototype of dialogue we can use for the future but definitely though I would have more capacity for it. I could pin it down down to the system we used and the time that was allotted to us during the jam. 

E: I tried to create a system that displays a random flower (or random anything) on screen. In Godot it seemed to work fine, but in the browser build of the game, the results were much more random and chaotic. I was disappointed that my system did work as planned, but it felt great to get some player feedback so I was aware of the bugs. I wonder if a downloadable game would have the same issues. I know this randomization system will be useful for many future projects, so I’ll be working on it while testing in various browsers. 

What's a way you learned to be more efficient in your process? What's something that you did that you feel wasn't as efficient as it could've been?

M: I think early on, I need to come up with better systems for how things are going to work. Whatever scenes can be inherited, or scripts reused, etc. For example, the way the ghost appears and disappears in the game is the same way the spacebar prompt does and some other things. This was done with code that was somewhat complex having to do with the player being in an Area2D and if the ghost was opaque or not after the end of the Tweening of the opacity. I was constantly using Tween to fade things in and out. Also the fonts, I did a stupid thing where every time I put in a text box, I had to go in and set the custom font. I need to have a scene that just has the main font loaded (I think you might be able to do this is the game preferences..? Or at least you could definitely create the option to)

V: Yeah, pretty much gonna echo what M is saying here. It is super important to think about reusability, even if its a small game like Ice Cream Social. It can save a ton of time knowing that certain components can be easily reused and instanced where ever you want them to be. Its cool also in games like this if you can figure out the prototype of systems (like dialogue) which can be used in bigger projects you have down the road.

E: Play Aseprite like its Starcraft https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bexWuHmV32A