OldBox Postmortem

OldBox 1.0.0
Postmortem - 2020/02/03

I'm PlainCrown, the creator of OldBox—my collection of three retro game clones. 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 January 21, 2020. The goal was to create a project that combines all three of my retro game clones, giving players a way to download and access the games more quickly and conveniently than installing them one by one. It also saves a relatively large amount of computer space, as some of the assets are re-used across projects and all of the save files from individual games could be combined into one.

Despite the project's simplicity, I still encountered several problems. The most tedious part of the project was fixing dependencies and re-defining file paths, which I had to redo from scratch a couple of times after making some errors and using files from separate games that had the same file names. Many changes and adjustments later, the 1.0.0 version of the project was released on January 31, 2020.

What went right:

• Speed. This was the first project that I managed to complete at a reasonable pace. While the simplicity of the project definitely plays a big role in its completion speed, the knowledge I gained by making three retro game clones beforehand helped a lot with making OldBox. I knew exactly what I need to do, and how to do it.
• Management. Besides programming, solo game development includes many additional details and duties that are necessary to create and publish a game. Duties such as finding fonts and audio resources, licensing them, creating basic pixel art and user interfaces, organizing a to-do list, creating promotional gifs and videos, thumbnails, writing game descriptions and devlogs, creating a trailer, tagging and linking a project, exporting and uploading the game, making back-up files, and the hundred other small tasks that come along with making a game felt like a nightmare during the development of my first couple of projects. However, now that I have done all of those things several times, I've finally become somewhat competent at taking care of general management duties.

What went wrong:

• Design. The game interface turned out a little more plain and boring  than I was aiming for but putting more time into making it look good without any artistic skill would have been a waste of time either way.
  
• Downloads. Although I only released OldBox a few days ago, the number of downloads is still relatively low. Other projects, such as my tetris clone ShapePlacer, were downloaded many more times during the first couple of days after release—even though ShapePlacer is inside of this project, along with two more games.

Conclusion:

OldBox was the culmination of roughly four months worth of work. A way to combine and showcase the three retro games I had created while learning about the Godot game engine. The goal all along was to learn more about game development and programming, and that goal was definitely reached. However, when it comes to grabbing the attention of other people and getting downloads, OldBox has not been very successful so far.

This has turned out to be a good small-scale example of how the game development industry works. Individual games, which are inside of this project, received more attention on both social media and the three platforms I published them on than OldBox has received so far. Even though it contains all three games. It doesn't matter how good your idea is, it only matters how well you can sell it.