Hello everyone!

Now that my submission for this GameDev challenge is complete I want to take the time to write a small Post Mortem for this project.
I have never written a Post Mortem before so I don't know if there is a specific format to follow.  

What went right 

First of all, I am really happy that I have actually completed my first challenge. As I have said in earlier posts I have never joined a GameDev challenge or other jams before. Since I have completed the project quite sometime before the deadline I am really happy with myself for most of the stuff. Completing the challenge and actually have a submission before the deadline was the most important point for me. Since I am also very new to this community I want to say that I am really enjoying my time here and I am very glad that I actually signed up on this site.  

Tools and Workflow

During the challenge, I realized how comfortable I was with the selection of my tools. I really love Unity and I am pretty sure that I will not switch the engine for the next couple of projects. The more I work with Unity the easier it gets to put things together. Selecting Bosca Ceoil and Bfxr for creating the music and sound effects turned out really good for me again. I highly can recommend both tools to everyone who has no experience in creating music but wants to create retro-styled music and sound effects for his game. Even though my tools for creating art assets were pretty limited I am still happy that I managed to create everything on my own. Yes, the game does not look very good but hey I made it myself.  

Playtesting

I am really happy that a good friend of mine offered help for playtesting. This made me realize how important playtesting is even in the early stages of a project. Because of this, I was able to solve a couple of problems that I did not realize from my perspective. Positive feedback also helps a lot with motivation problems. Usually, this was a big factor in past projects. I usually always lost my motivation at some point. I think for future projects I will try to involve more people into playtesting in order to get more feedback and keeping me motivated.

Clean Code

Even though I first rushed a lot of things I actually tried to keep my code pretty clean. This really helped me a lot in later stages of the project. For the slow down item, I actually had to redo some stuff in all moving object classes. Since I kept everything in a good order these changes were a lot easier than I thought. This really taught me to keep my code clean even in smaller projects. 

Writing about my progress

I really had a lot of fun writing those little "reports" every week. I think I will try this practice for future projects a little bit more. It really helps to reflect on the progress and also to get valuable feedback from other people. Even though my writing is still pretty bad I hope I can improve on this with time.   

What went wrong 

Even though most things during this challenge went pretty smooth, there were still some things that I want to try a different approach in my next project.

Moving the Unity project

Since I am currently away from home during the week due to work I had to switch systems a lot. Moving projects and reimporting them to Unity twice a week really lost me a lot of time and nerves. For the future, I really need to find a better solution to this. Sadly I have not managed to set up a git repository with Unity. This would make a lot of things a lot faster and easier. 

Balancing gameplay

One with I kinda don't like about Unity is how you control public variables on game objects. For example, every enemy type had a public variable movSpeed that, obviously, controlled the movement speed of the enemy. In order to balance gameplay, you have to switch a lot in the inspector in order to change these settings. Of course, I could easily make those variables private which would only move the problem into Visual Studio. I think for my next project I want to try to place all gameplay relevant variables into one file or a few separated subfiles. This would allow balancing gameplay at one place. I guess this would be a really bad idea if the project gets bigger, but for small projects, this could work a lot better.

What's next

I am not really sure what I want to focus on now that this project is completed. Currently, I have a couple of ideas for my next project. I will talk about this about this in a different blog that I have planned for the next days. One thing I am certain of is that I really want to improve some other skills than coding. I need to get better in creating art assets. Since I want to stick to my plan of creating all assets for my games on my own, I really need to improve on creating them. I have finally bought Photoshop and currently working through a lot of tutorials. Here is a little preview of a small thing I yesterday:

I called this little guy Myps and he might become the main character for my next project idea.  I know it is nothing special but compared to my Frogger assets I think this already a good improvement for only one day of practice.  I have already tried a few things with animations which I might show in my next blog. 

I guess that is all I wanted to talk about, sorry if I didn't go too much into details.

Thanks for reading!

Until next time.  

- Znippy