Postmortem for Devtober 2020

I've had the main mechanic of this game in the back of my mind for a long time: passing levels by carrying something you depend on. I decided to make a game based on said mechanic, by getting inspiration from other puzzle platformers like Portal and Lightmatter. All the art and code were made by me, and I only used external music and sounds (Frankum & Frankumjay).

I posted my progress on twitter almost every day, since it was one of the requirements of ThisIsEllian's Devtober. I think this last bit is what helped me finish the game, since I would have otherwise given it up mid-development. While I did procrastinate a lot and rushed development towards the end, I still have a project ready and done!

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Surprisingly, a lot of things! I'm particularly happy with:

• The movement: I managed to make a movement system that feels pretty good. It's not perfect but I'm glad I got to add some tricks to make it more responsive and less frustrating (coyote jump, jump buffering).
• Puzzles: designing the puzzles with the main mechanic in mind was tougher than expected. The levels are pretty large and contain several puzzles each. I needed a specific number of crawlers in each room in order to progress, and the levels had to be designed in a way to allow such needs. In the end I'm satisfied with most of the puzzles, as they're not too easy or too hard to solve.
• The optional collector task: on each level you need only one crawler to progress to the next. I made keeping the other crawlers an extra task, where they had to be brought at the end of the level. While there's no big reward for doing so, just bringing them all to the end was a puzzle itself, so that makes the reward just more puzzles!

WHAT WENT WRONG

As the end of the month came closer I realized I had to cut some planned content in order to release a working game from start to finish:

• Story: I had planned to add a simple story where a friendly (or not so much) AI accompanied the player between levels by exposing its dialogue on screens scattered around the facility. Realising I didn't have the time to work on this I had to cut it, so the game remains storyless.
• Lack of atmosphere and game feel: I wanted to make the underground facility much more atmospheric through parallax backgrounds, many objects and items scattered around, and various particle effects. While I added some of these in the last few days, I preferred fixing bugs and polishing existing content rather than create more.

The game also has some issues that would require too much time and that I was too burned out to solve. These could have been avoided if I had better planned things before starting development but hey, I'm not a very smart cookie!

WHAT I'VE LEARNED

Something that I wish I hadn't done and that I noticed just at the end of development was that I worked on different parts of the game (art/code/sound/technical stuff) completely separately. For example, I started with making most ofthe art so I'd get that out of the way, then wrote 80% of the code in the following two weeks, and just at the and I dedicated a few days for sound, menus and checkpoints. This is definetly not what I want for future projects, since so many problems arised from this separation of work.
I also worked on saving and loading for the first time, as well as thinkering with Unity's audio mixer, which were the annoying technical parts that had to be done.
Knowing myself though... I'll probably repeat the same mistakes in the future. I'll drink to that :)

CONCLUSIONS

Overall it's been a fun month of development, and the game came out as good as I could make it as the incompetent square filler that I am. For now though, it's time to have some pause from game making and go deal with irl stuff.

If you read through this entire block of wall, I envy you attention span and thank you for reading!