Space walk postmortem

Hey there! 👋

This time I've decided to create my game Postmortem so I can summarize up the entire process & experience.

This project is my homework for school, but I wanted to "make it real" instead of just wraping up some monsters and go from point A to point B. I wanted some challenge (I've only been studying videogames for 4-5 months now) and I wanted to see how far could I get with what I know.

So first I had the guidelines

As a school project I had to follow some guidelines that pretty much made the game as it is.

At first I thought not having all the freedom I'd like to would be problem, truth is, you should always write down some guidelines before you start your project, before you even imagine it, or else you'll get lost somewhere between the development and the "is this finished yet?".

Theme, art

I'm a big fan of space and sci-fi so I decided to draw an alien-astronaut and the rest of the drawing style came along.

I imagined a lost planet with different creatures and I think it end up decent. I chose pixel art because it's easier than traditional 2D for me, plus I love that retro style.

Testing the idea

I shared via Twitter the progress of the demo I wanted to create to test my idea. Here  you can check that process.

I spent 3 days creating a viable demo and posting it here, in this same project, so everyone could play it. I received a lot of feedback and I also thought that I could remake the game with all the new ideas I had, + investing in the quality of the game now I had every mech and the rest figured out.

The remake

I spent 1 week creating the final version.

Testing out, trying some things that it the end I couldn't add to the project, etc. But I'm quite happy with the result.

Added a new interface, a new enemy, rewriting code, working on bugs, well, it was a hell of a ride thanks to Unity weird behaviour sometimes.

How I organized the project

I never created a full game before, but I have experience creating digital projects.

I created a loooooooooong check/to-do list with every possible aspect of the game (spoiler: the list grows instead of decreasing while you develop your game), and I tried to finish some tasks everyday. When finished, I just decided what I should focus on the next day and add more issues to the list.

I tried not to rush and skipped a task if I felt like I couldn't fix it, revisiting it the next day or the other.

"Could you try this... please?"

Last but not least: I had to ask some people to be my testers.

Truste me, after 3 days full developing and trying your game, you lose focus and you can't check every bug.

Your testers (especially those who are playing your game for the first time) will see everything you're not seeing. Test the game before publishing it, and hear carefully to the suggestions of your testers.

We reach the end

I really loved this experience.

I loved challenging myself, and not only creating a demo but even remaking it from scratch, rewritig my own code, design everything carefully. I think I also learned a lot about the process, about patience and about suggestions & feedback.