So, November’s game has come and gone. And because I care more about making awesome games than typing about them, I have issues writing things in a timely manner. We finished Re:Volition 21 days ago, and the next game is already nearly finished. At the end of the post-mortem I will talk a bit about the next game.
But for now, lets talk about the issues with Re:Volition. Re:Volition was kind of a disaster. It had decent mechanics, but they were nothing special, and honestly any platformer could have done more with less.
One of the largest issues with Re:Volition was its Art. Since this is the category of things that I was in charge of, I can take full credit for these issues. I have never animated a character before, and that was the biggest issue. I accounted for the time that it would take to learn how to draw a single character, but not for the time that it took to animate that character. This left so little time for backgrounds and visual interest that the game looked extremely poor. And even after spending nearly the entire month on animation, the character that was unacceptable. We had to make a placeholder that looked passable in the course of about a hour.
Time management is going to be a common theme in this post mortem, as you will see. The nature of trying to release an entire game in 4 weeks is that time is our greatest enemy. And since we are doing this project (Making a game every month for a year) we found ourselves trying to develop at our old pace. This was problematic, for a number or reasons. For example, Steve was still building core systems, including the menus on the last few days of the project. We had no time to do deep level design or nearly any QA testing.
So when it came down to it, a month is a lot shorter than we had previously anticipated.
For our December game, we made changes, not to the scope of the project, but rather to our own workflows. These changes will not solve all of the problems, but they will help us get within striking distance for December’s project.
December’s game will be another platformer, based on the previous system, but rebuilt from the ground up. It aims to tell a story, and evoke a feeling of peace. We will have more on this next week, with a full reveal, but suffice it to say that it has so much potential that we are considering making a full version of it in the coming years.
And I think I should leave you with one more thing, How about a name?
Felidae.
