Dagonet Platformer Postmortem

Goodbye Dagonet

Sadly I have come to the end of the time I have for development on Sir Dagonet. So lets go over how the development went. 

to bring some structure to this, lets go over some things that went well and some that went less well. 

Successes
  • I learnt a lot about Gdevelop over the past few weeks working on this project. figuring things out like how to use a Boolean value to call functions, and also smaller things like just getting my head around the dev environment.
  • Death and respawning. I was so happy when I got this working. Death meant that my game had stakes and a player could fail to pass a level or challenge. Respawning means a player that fails a challenge can attempt it again rather than being left on a empty screen.  
  • Thinking in design. I did two pitches for platformer games, the first I realised required technical skills I don't yet possess and also might have stretched the ability of Gdevelop. I now have a much better idea of what can and cant be done along with what I personally will find easy or difficult.

Failures
  • Art and assets. for this project I used example assets supplied by my class for all my objects which means that no matter how well I may code or design my game it will always feel a bit weird to play and look kind of terrible. In the future Ill make sure that my games are made with art that I create.
  • Scope. While I kept the game within the scope of what I am capable of creating (just barely) I failed to consider the amount of time it would require, and I ended up with a lot of unfinished concepts. In the future I will make sure that my games revolves around one or two key features so that they can be finished rather than simply abandoned. 

Beyond these points I have also thought about my relationship to the unit and how I have approached my study in game dev. Mainly that despite my expectation and usual experiences at my university this unit is very hands off. I can really do whatever I want in my design but while working on my platformer I spent most of my time and effort on following example content. In the end I, for the most part, implemented mechanics exactly the way they showed us to and ended up with the example game they made rather than my game. This explains why Dagonet looks like a spaceman for example, I could have created my own sprite but used the one provided to me instead despite the fact that figuring out how to use their sprite took as much time as making my own would have. For the next two games I create for my study I will forge my own path a bit more and do a lot less of following the leader. 

Join me in the next post where I start working on a space game.
         

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