Postmortem 6 - Creating a Quality Game

This is it, boys. The last entry.

It's been a long journey, hasn't it? If you read through all of these, I deeply appreciate it. This is the entry where I talk about the biggest goal, which was creating an overall high quality entry for the Harold Jam.

My motivation has a few layers, of course. I'm a naturally competitive guy, and combining that with my general confidence in my skills, it's only to be expected that I would want to flex on everyone else with my jam entry. I have to admit, I even take a sense of twisted pride that I'm able to make such a great jam entry in only a few days while everyone else is struggling to keep up.

But there were less selfish motivations, too. Human's on his way out, and I want him to leave with a bang. I already rallied a bunch of people that would have otherwise skipped out on the jam if not for the circumstances, so I want to leave him with the best Harold Jam we've ever had. And that means doing my part and making a great game as well.

And of course, I've got the chops.

You've seen it in the other postmortems by now. I sorta know what I'm doing. I spend pretty much every waking hour thinking about games and game development in one way or another. I listen to development podcasts while I go on walks, I can't help but play video games with a mindset of "what can I learn from this?" Even film and television, to me they all serve double duty as entertainment and learning opportunities. My brain is just naturally equipped for making games.

And if there's one pattern I hope you noticed throughout these postmortems, it's this:

Take inspiration from everything. I made my combat system by drawing from my peers, my role models, and the games I play for fun. I wrote my story by taking the emotions I felt from games that came before, and fused them with my own style and values. Even my music is derivative to an extent, drawing from games of the past as well as the work that went into Axial. Learn from others. That's the biggest way you can improve and make great games.

But don't worry, I've got more practical and specific stuff to discuss too.

For starters, a big element of making a high quality entry in such a short time is knowing what you can do well and fast. I can make 16-bit sprites pretty well, but it takes a while. But Game Boy Color sprites? I can make those in minutes, and I'm quite good at that, too. The same goes for my music: I could leave my comfort zone and try to break the chiptune music, but in such a limited timespan I'm better off sticking to what I'm already good at. I also had this GBC style tileset I bought years ago that I never got a lot of mileage out of, and at this point I was pretty much locked into making a Game Boy Color game.

These were all aesthetic choices, yes, but also practical. I knew what I could make quickly and easily without stressing myself out, and I committed to it hard to ensure that it never felt like I was cutting corners. That's the second takeaway I hope you get from all of this: one of the best ways to do well in a jam is to "hide" your laziness. Don't push yourself, but make it look like you put in the effort.

Genuine effort went into RATD, of course. I hope that's obvious if you've played it. But beyond that, I stayed in my comfort zone and stuck to what I'm already good at. Jams are a great time to grow, but that growth can only be supported if you aren't struggling in other areas. For me, learning MZ was my place to grow, and everything else needed to be in my comfort zone to allow that to happen. I grew in other ways, of course. My knowledge of balancing has improved, I've gotten good feedback on storytelling, and any soundtrack I write will make me better at music as a whole.

I, uh... expected I would have more to say, honestly.

This ended up being my shortest postmortem, because, like... what more do I say? I wanna make Human happy, I wanna make myself happy, so I made a good game by doing what I'm good at hahaha! I guess not everything needs pages and pages of analysis.

So, that was Rage Against The Dying.

It was a resounding success. If anything, it was too successful, with people begging me to return to the battle system and characters that I don't have any immediate plans on revisiting. But the game did what I wanted it to. It was a polished entry with a lot of depth. The music is fantastic, the combat is great (but it could use some rebalancing), and the story resonated with people a lot. So, I guess now it's time to just figure out what I wanna do next year!