Wall Of Logic Postmortem

Wall of Logic Postmortem 

Hello all, It has been awhile. I am back again with another Postmortem for the game “Wall Of Logic” that I recently completed and uploaded to itch.io. In typical postmortem fashion I will start with a brief overview of the project before going over what went right, what went wrong and what I plan to do in the future with what I have learned. Without further ado, let us dive into the background of the project and how it came to be.

The project itself was originally called Attack of the Wiener Snatchers and I started working on it when I wanted to join a Gameboy Game Jam. The theme of the jam was space and I remembered a book with the same name that I read as a child. My plan was to create a side-scrolling platformer where hot dogs from outer space transformed all of the hotdogs at a picnic into evil enemies and you had to eat your way through them to win. I picked an engine (Gameboy Studio) from the list supplied by the jam as my knowledge of Gameboy game development was close to zero and got started. The jam was about a week long but that didn’t stop me from procrastinating as hard as I could. I ran through some tutorials that I found on YouTube and barely got anything done. I did make a few different sprites but literally almost nothing is left from the original project. I withdrew from the jam a day before it ended, like a coward that didn’t want to have a black mark of jams attended and not submitted. I still really wanted to create my own Gameboy game so I resolved myself to make one regardless of it not being related to a game jam. I had a friend’s birthday coming up who enjoys puzzles so I decided to make a game with them in mind and hopefully produce a physical game cartridge as a gift.

What went right with the project? Let’s start with the fact that I did make all of the art assets by myself from scratch. (Not including the textbox and cursor sprite that came as a default with Gameboy Studio ). I was also able to not only finish the game, but was also able to load it onto a blank Gameboy cartridge and play it on my purple Gameboy color. I did have a lot of fun designing the puzzles and coming up with dumb but humorous jokes. The thing I am most pleased about is the working piano puzzle with the coded songs. I also enjoyed making the lame but secret boss fight. I don’t know how many people will encounter it or if it will be found at all.

Moving on to things that went not as well as they could have, let's start with the engine itself. Gameboy Studio is super neat and convenient because everything is drag and drop but it struggles in other aspects. One of them being that the actor has a strange overlap with the player actor. In the orb puzzle room, the first orb completely disappears when the player cursor is at the same x coordinate. This bug always appears regardless of what position I moved the actors to in the room. I was unable to find a way to fix this. I don’t know if this is a limitation of the Gameboy itself or if it's just a bug for the point and click game settings. The only other problem that I ran into was creating music and sound effects for the game. Gameboy Studio does have its own built in tools for music creation that I did try my hand at but it does not not have anything for sound effects. It doesn't help that I don’t know much about music creation and Gameboy games can only accept a certain type of sound file. That is the reason why I have little to no sound effects in the game though I do have a few custom songs/notes. I mostly relied on the music that is created in the default project. I do plan on going back and adding my own  if and when I become better versed in sound effect and music creation. I did try using FX hammer, but I will need to spend more time on that. I will probably use a different development program other than Gameboy studio for my next project as I miss using data structures.

  Last but not least I will go over things I hope to improve on. Scheduling and procrastination are still at the top of my list of things to improve on. I still haven’t written a postmortem for Ashbound yet and have already joined a new month-long game jam. After those two I would place increasing the appeal of my itch.io page. Whenever I pull up other creators and view their pages, I find that they are super stylized and exciting. Unfortunately, my pages are as flavorful as a sack of flour. Last but not least would like to try and join a discord to find some team members for an upcoming game jam. That’s all for now, hopefully I will see you all in the next one.