postmortem

This is my first game in 2021 and the first game in Unity.

I quit Godot for several reasons:

1. It does not have a mature assets store system, so you have to build almost everything from scratch. It is fun but time-consuming. reinventing the wheel is not a very productive way if you just want to build fancy games. In this game, I used so many items from the asset store, and saved me at least a week's time.

2. Godot has several minor problems while using it. Admit it, Unity has been there for years and there is a reason. They have thousands of developers and they are not paid for nothing. The two things I can't bear with Godot the most are: it has a bad selection detecting when you try to drag something in the scene, and the export file uses a different way to read files, compare to the engine itself, so after exporting something might be broken. 

3. In the future, if I plan to make games in other game companies, Unity would be much useful at that time. 

Of course, Unity has its own problem, it is much slower than Godot, in starting time, compile time, export time. its support for pixel art is quite weird, I would take some time to learn it. But compare to the benefit it has, I think Unity is a better choice for me now.

Back to this game. I'm surprised there are several players who would actually play it more than once to read the endings. I'm a big fan of storytelling and tried to add more dialogues in my game as long as I have time. But they didn't work very well before. I think for this time, there are two parts that make it works fine:

1. The game itself is light. I mean I can still add more stuff on it but the core of it is light, just shooting, there is no moving or anything else. The time between each dialog event is short the time to finish the game is short. So the player might have the patient to play it again.

2. The dialog itself is fun. It has more options(even some of them are useless), and I find someone to help me polish it and make it feels better.

The only part I kind of regret is, I didn't imagine it would work well, otherwise, I would add more elements, like ending collection and new game plus. It's hard to predict whether players would like or not like this game in a game jam, you don't even know how many people would play this game.

I would consider making this game a real game if I don't have a better one in the next half year. There are two directions to extend it:

1. Keep it the current play mode, make it an endless/roguelike game. After killing the monsters or finish certain events, you would get rewards to update yourself, or unlock other events. It can also unlock other levels and may bring other fairytales into the game too.

2. Make it a level-based game instead, after several levels, you would unlock some events. 

For the later game, I would:

1. Keep trying to add dialogues if possible. Dialogue is a good way to make the connection between the player and the game. For that, I need to learn more about the dialogue system I'm using, especially how to export and import it easily.

2. Speed up prototyping time so I can have more time to polish it if the game is potential.

3. Join more popular game jams. It sounds utilitarian but I'm a utilitarian person after all...