Hello everyone!

It's... actually Tuesday, which means it was time for a weekly devlog yesterday. I understand that I dropped the ball yet again, but since I have been on a small hiatus in terms of not making any updates to the game, I thought I would share some of my thoughts about my game postmortem, create if not a dialogue between other people and developers a space for me to discuss my own opinions about what work, what didn't work, and so on and so forth. With that being said, let's get into it.

Game Design

Game Design is actually much more complicated than I initially realized. Sure I have had experience making a video game in college, and I have worked extensively on the "API" that I use for the Guardians of RPG video game,  that doesn't make game design or game development easy. Like any field in computer science, it's notoriously difficult, and I believe that even for a CS major like me who loved RPG that it was naive to make my first official video game this ambitious. Working in an object oriented way means that your classes will depend on other classes, and so when creating your game, you need to have all of this planned out. When creating new features, you have to plan specifically how this will factor into your currently working architecture. Otherwise, your game is like a house of cards. It could be pretty, but even the slightest wind can create game breaking bugs, glitches, and headache as you have to rebuild everything.

When I created v1.01, I fell squarely into this category of people who didn't optimize code and blindly followed YouTube tutorials until I got something that resembled a MVP.  While I was still able to learn a lot and gleam value from some of those videos, I learned that when it comes to actual game design, the YouTube tutorials will only tell you half the story. They will teach you how to implement features in a new game project, but will never tell you how to optimize or how to use best coding practices, and this is really the fundamentals that a game developer would need if they are to do anything in the industry. What I found to be really helpful in learning game development actually came from Udemy courses that I have the privilege of taking due to my work benefits. If not for these lessons specifically, I'm not sure if I would have been able to advance in the complicated software that is unity in the first place.

When I decided to create v1.02, I wanted to fix a lot of those optimization problems, and while I believe I've done pretty well in this department (a lot has improved from the last version to this version) I still believe that there is much to be desired for optimization, readability and more.  With that being said, I want to create yet another project with hopefully better architecture and follow tried and tested game design principles when making this.  Essentially what I will be doing is creating 2 projects: One that starts over from scratch, and one that starts where I left off in v1.02. That way, any mistakes I make in the ladder option I can learn from when re-creating it in my new project.

Time

This project has taken over a year to create, which is really frightening. I want to be able to produce the game as quickly as possible, but I have obligations that don't allow to me to work on this full time (and I do not make any money from this currently to even consider this). Working on this game for a year straight was enough to send me on a hiatus in the first place,  but it has also given me to time to reflect and think about new game mechanics, how to balance the game, and more story ideas for future versions. Hopefully I will be able to come back and work on the game better and faster than ever, but no promises.

I also want to stop creating MVPs for the game. MVPs are great for quickly establishing a product, but now that my product has been realized, it's time to stop rushing my code and my game dev process and to actually work on updating and upgrading my project so that it's something other people would want to play. I will still make goals for myself, but I won't be making MVP goals like I did for v 1.01 and v 1.02.

Summary

That's just a few things that I've been thinking about post game launch that I thought I should share with you all. If you have any opinions about any of this feel free to let me know. As always I want to thank everyone who has been supporting me up to this point. Your support has been really encouraging. Be sure to check out the latest version of the game Guardians of RPG v1.02, and as always, I will see you next week.