Now that Tuca Quest has released and has had it's day one update after Lactuca Optima streamed the game, I am making a post to discuss my thoughts now that the game is done.

Things Learned

This is the first fully finished game by me and I've learned quite a bit. One thing being that diverging paths take a lot of work for very little gain. What I mean is that everyone asks for diverging paths in games, but making a truly meaningful path divergence is a tall order that most times won't be recognized as much as other aspects of a game (art, dialogue, etc.). You take the original Walking Dead by Telltale Games. Despite it being entirely focused on being a story based game where "Choices Matter", little to no choices affect the story. Correct me if I'm wrong, but throughout my two playthroughs I found that my choices lead to the same end with different cutscenes. An example would be an early choice between that nerd and the girl with the gun. You choose who to save, but they both end up dying in the exact same part of the game. Sure I got to see more of their character by saving one or the other, but when people say "Choices Matter" it's implied that you'll see new paths throughout the game and not the same one with a new code (code funny haha) of paint. Though I don't really blame devs for not going all in with diverging paths since, as stated earlier, you get little reward for making meaningful paths. Only game design nerds like me will praise it. The average audience member doesn't care as they have other responsibilities outside of finding out how their playthrough changed based on their choices. In Tuca Quest I attempted to make diverging paths coming from meaningful choices, but I didn't make choices matter as much as I wanted. I didn't have it in mind when I started this silly game.

Something else I learned was that art takes forever to make. I mean obviously I knew that art took a lot of time, but making individual sprites and images for combat is very tedious and made me appreciate artists for games even more. I developed an "Art style" halfway through development (tracings with thick lines). It's been very rewarding to develop a recognizable look for what I make in games. I developed a style in video editing that comes through in the movies throughout Tuca Quest, but now I have a drawn style to go a long with it.

Positives of Tuca Quest

These will just be bullet points of things I'm happy with at the end of development

• The movies throughout, the art style combined with the editing connects each chapter with a consistent look
• Chapter 3, I think I made a genuinely fun and interesting environment divorced from the comedic nature of development
• The Playable Characters, I had a lot of fun writing the people I knew and exaggerating their traits to make fun defined characters
• Party Member Roles, I think I did a good job defining each member with specific unique and malleable roles based off of archetypes

Negatives of Tuca Quest

I think it's very important to be critical of yourself, a lot of "Bad Parts" of Tuca Quest are genuinely done because "It's funny", but other parts are just genuinely bad or not good. These bullet points are the actually bad

• Chapter 2, I wager the worst chapter of Tuca Quest I like the gimmick of joking about generic fantasy and larping, but outside of that it doesn't have the adventure of Chapter 1 or the uniqueness of Chapter 3
• Game flow, At certain parts of the game I didn't explain as much as I think I should have, I don't want to baby players, but sometimes I was unreasonable cryptic as to what you need to do to progress (except chapter 3 which is purposely cryptic)
• Choices, There are a lot of meaningful choices in Tuca Quest, but I didn't go as far as I wish I did in making them impactful

Conclusion

I'm very happy with Tuca Quest, in the beginning you can see it was supposed to be a shitty joke game for my dear friend Lactuca Optima, but became more than that with all the ideas I started coming up with throughout the course of making it.