FoodEater Postmortem

FoodEater 1.3.0
Postmortem - 2020/01/07

I'm PlainCrown, the creator of FoodEater—my second game so far. Now that the project is finished, it's time to reflect on what went right, what went wrong, and to learn from my mistakes.

Production:

The production began on June 26, 2019. While the finished project still doesn't look particularly impressive, it's definitely an upgrade from my first attempt at designing the game and the UI.

At first, I intended to make a basic snake clone to learn how to implement grid-based movement and make multiple objects follow each other. Adding complex additional features like an options menu, color customization, an obstacle mode and high score tracking wasn't on my mind at the time. So I simply named the game Snake, which stuck around until my 1.0 release in July, 2019, even though I added high score tracking, a controls page, and three snake speeds near my presumed end of the project.

After releasing Snake, I went on to make a tetris clone. I thought that would be the end of this project. Until I returned to BlockCrasher—my first game, a breakout clone—and fleshed it out with additional features to make the game feel more complete. At that point, perfectionism took over and I felt the urge to do the same thing with my snake and tetris clones. So at the start of December 2019, I returned to work on this project and renamed it to FoodEater, among other changes.

Thanks to my phenomenal procrastination skills, releasing three FoodEater updates and finishing the project almost took me an entire month. However, I managed to finish the game and release the final update on December 31, 2019—just in time for the end of the year. Although FoodEater is still a fairly basic clone that doesn't stray too far from the classic snake mechanics, all of its features are clean, smooth, and hopefully bug-free.

What went right: 

• Consistency. By maintaining a similar look and structure to my first game, I was able to create FoodEater much faster and more efficiently than my first project. Using a similar template also allowed me to find useful changes to the format and bring them over to my first game, improving both games simultaneously.
• Simplicity. The simple game mechanics didn't leave a lot of room for errors, so eliminating bugs and edge-case issues was relatively easy.

What went wrong: 

• Following a tutorial. I wasn't confident in my ability to create grid-based movement on my own, so I started the project by following a tutorial for creating snake with the Godot Game Engine. Unfortunately, a lot of the code in the tutorial didn't fit with what I wanted my game to be like and I spent way too much time trying to implement code that was doomed to fail from the start.
• "Marketing" if one can call it that. I didn't expect FoodEater to be particularly popular or successful, but I was surprised to see that it didn't even receive half the views and downloads of my breakout and tetris clones. Either I presented the project quite poorly compared to my other games, or players find snake mechanics relatively boring.
• Grid cell size. The cells in the game grid are 40x40 pixels, which eventually turned out to be slightly smaller than I'd like. Failing to change directions before reaching the next cell can spell disaster and makes controlling the snake more challenging than it should be, especially in the fast speed mode. Larger cells would have given players more time to react and switch directions, but by the time I wanted to change the grid size, my entire project was already built around the 40x40 foundation.

Conclusion:

I mainly made this project for the sake of learning how to implement mechanics that I had never used before, so getting a lot of views, downloads and attention was never the goal. However, this project made it clear to me that creating visually appealing and exciting games matters far more than I previously thought. I don't think it's a coincidence that FoodEater is the least visually exciting and enticing one of my three game clones, and that it received significantly less attention than the other two games despite equivalent promotion across social media. To attract attention, making a game that looks enticing to play even from a simple gif should definitely be a high priority for any serious project.

That being said, I'm still quite satisfied with the results of this project. I accomplished my goal of learning grid-based movement and learned a lot more than I ever thought I would learn from making a basic snake clone. Now I just have to do the same with my tetris clone.