​Anthemic Aggressor - What I Learned 3 Years Later

Hello to anyone who stumbles across this! After nearly 3 years of ignoring this small game, I'm finally coming back to give a brief postmortem on this game, talk about what I learned, what the experience was like, and how I would improve and make more of it if I were to do it again.

The first thing I did when I came back to this game is play it again, and oh boy there are so many glitches in this game its quite frankly amazing. Bombs clip through walls, enemies chase you off cliffs to their death, the slime enemies' movement makes zero sense at all, the player's jumping and general movement feels sloppy and hard to predict,  it can be hard to figure out where you're going to land, the controls aren't great - basically there's bugs and glitches everywhere. I mean, to be fair I made this game in 3 days by myself and under those circumstances, I'm honestly really proud with how it turned out. That doesn't mean its not awful though. Its bad. Bad in a really charming "oh wow nice game buddy great job!" kind of way. Which, isn't bad for me, as this is my first game ever released and under that context I am extremely proud of it. But, there's always lessons to be learned.

Lesson One: spend more time level designing. The level design in this game is - to put it mildly - atrocious. Enemies are placed haphazardly without much rhyme or reason besides "I think they'd make a good obstacle here." The levels all feel like one giant palette that doesn't have any visual variety. It feels like there's no thought or effort put into it here and that's because there is none; the level designs came together in the last 24 hours of the game jam - at which point I was up for about 30 hours and about 4 energy drinks deep and by "came together" I mean I used the tile map feature in Unity and constructed the levels on the spot as quickly as I could to just get it out of the way.  Not ideal I know, but I had a deadline and I was way too ambitious with the project's mechanics which gave me no time to really work on levels. I know I have much better level designing skills - implementing enemies in a believe-able and challenging way, creating a level that fits into a larger world, designing interesting encounters that make the player think and use all the game's mechanics in interesting and creative ways: these are all skills that I know how to do if I put my mind to it. I just need to do that on game development projects going forward.

Lesson Two: time management. Time management has been the bane of my existence since day one of kindergarten. I've always been bad at paying attention to the time and spending too much time on one feature while neglecting the other. I've gotten better since college as now things have significantly slowed down and I've started implementing better upfront planning principles, but this project is a great example of my time management at its worst. With this project, I didn't plan upfront at all; I just came up with an idea and started working on what mechanics I thought I needed. As the project moved along and I became wearier, I started adding more and more mechanics and expanding upon them rather than starting the game as a whole. I've always been more comfortable in the prototype phase of games than in the development phase because usually the development phase means polishing art and sound which has never been my strong suit, so I tried my best to keep working on those parts of the game. This lead to my level design problem, and also lead to the lack of bug fixing as I didn't have enough time to sit down and try and fix bugs at the end of development. In the future, I need to be better about creating a development timeline and sticking to this timeline. For my next project, I think I'm going to implement a small-scale Jira-like ticket system, as this kind of development is something I'm very familiar with.

Lesson Three: play better to my strengths. Looking back at this game, I see a lot of parts that are really promising. I think there's potential for a really interesting story of a poisoned warrior on a journey for a life-saving antidote. As I've gotten older, I've realized that I'm actually a pretty good writer when it comes to stories, and I have the skills to make a compelling and meaningful story - something that not a lot of people have skills in. I've written screenplays and movies and short stories that I'm proud of, and I used to be the guy people would to go to get their stuff edited and get advice on their writing in college. I should be putting way more of my time and energy into the writing aspect of my games, as I think my unique blend of technical programming skill and writing talent. Next time, the story will be a more central part of the game and I'll put more time and energy to making a story that has meaningful themes and an exciting plot. The mechanics of the game - though they need tightening and a lot of time to make them as satisfying as possible - are fundamentally pretty fun. Even though the game is very rough around the edges and has a lot of flaws, I still feel like it's pretty fun to play and going back to it, I was surprised I was actually having some fun. Now, there's a lot to work on here, as the wall-jumping is glitchy as hell, the jump/double jump is way too floaty which makes aiming as a player difficult, and dashing doesn't really go far enough to be useful in daily gameplay - just to name a few. But, these are all tweaks and fixes that could've been made had I spent more time workshopping and fixing bugs. I spent too much time fretting over whether my art or animations looked good for a naked eye and trying to make the game 'pop' more, rather than spending my time doing what I do best - making satisfying stories and honing in on good fundamental game mechanics.

Overall, I gotta say I'm surprised coming back to this project. For a while after I made this project, I was kind of embarrassed. I felt like the quality wasn't all the way there,  and that any body who looked at the game would look at it and write it off as a shitty ripoff game. 3 years later, I look back at the game and see the passion pouring out of the seams. Every broken mechanic, every enemy that spazzes off a cliff, reminds me why I love making games so much. It takes me back to the 19 year old kid programming in his parents room on the summer of COVID-19 trying desperately to finish his first ever 'official' game. Behind this game, at least 20 other prototypes live in the shadow it casts. I remember sleeping for an entire day after this game jam, and I remember looking back a week later and noticing every single flaw, every mistake, every bug and ripping texture, and I just felt awful. I felt like I failed and I didn't make a good game. I did make a good game. Is it great? No not really. Is it a game you can play for a long time? No not really. Is it a game I'd play regularly? No way in hell! It's a good game because I made it, I did the thing I've been wanting to do since I was a kid. It's a good game because, to me, its physical proof of my love of making games and a great starting point for a hopefully long life of developing games.