Post Mortem

It is way too late to be writing, so I'll be editing this in the morning.  I'm writing and uploading tonight because I gave myself a deadline of "Sunday Night".  I'd really like to be in the habit of shipping the product by the deadline I give myself since that seems to be such a major hang up of game dev/game design.

There were a lot of features that in the last hour, I just had to say "F*ck it, just go with this".  Different font than what I wanted, no intro cut scene, shallow use of the primary "circus builder".  Nonetheless, it's out, and it's proof of concept, and that's mostly what I wanted.  There's good content that I'm incredibly proud of and I can always come back and flesh out some more of the content like what I did with Salamander.

Will hope to do more thorough post mortem sometime this week, and maybe add a few things I had hoped to accomplish/add to this project.

EDIT: 8/28/18 

So just to reiterate, I've definitely had a satisfaction the day after in my decision to release on time with the features I had.  I wouldn't have been able to work on the game at all today given my schedule, and there would've been a chance that it would have languished.

Moving forward, I think there are some things that I gave a lot of extra emphasis on that didn't contribute as much to gamePLAY but contributed a lot to the narrative.  I got really caught up with cut scenes and dialogue.  Dialogue actually takes quite a bit of time and can really be a hang up if you do it wrong  In some ways, it might be wiser to prep it all on a google doc ahead of time or a word file.

Speaking of outside docs, there were two "producer" like things (maybe three), that I felt were really vital to this go of a project.  

1) Prioritizing and Tracking

There were a lot of times in this project where I really just had to stay focused and know what the game plan for the day was.  I had to act as a producer and just tell myself, "Hey, these are your priorities today.  I know you'd like to get to combat, but you don't get to do that until every map is built."  

There were also a lot of moments where having a notebook was incredibly valuable.  I would write bugs and fixes that I needed implemented.  A lot of the problem is that without that I would waste a lot of time hunting for things or not remembering what major bugs to fix.

2) Outside documentation

Like I already said, there's a certain degree that it would have been handy to have the narrative written outside of the game.  Strangely it can feel very organic in RPGMaker because you really get to visually see a repartee between parties talking.  However, things have to get written on the fly.  You're not necessarily always thinking as logically as you'd like about "How would Ursula actually respond?"  "How would Pi actually respond?"

I think a game design document would have helped as well.

3) I dont remember.

But I will say this -- the cutscenes at the end were awesome, I was very proud of them.  The world was awesome.  There were a lot of cool things.  But I have to discuss the circus mechanic.  On the one hand, I didn't focus enough on that in my opinion.  It was such a key component of the game, yet I really didn't pay it much mind until nearly the end of development.

The bit though, is that near the end of development, I bum-rushed the rest of what the circus could do -- and since I had the core parts, that last segment actually came quickly and easily and smoother than I expected.

Strangely, I finished the game at the usual time anyway --a round 2 to 230.  Makes you wonder if a game/project is really just made to fit into whatever container you put it in.