A Quick PostMortem On My First Ever Game

Revenge Quest is my first actual release as a game dev. Though it is a very short experience I am comforted by the fact that it is quite densely packed with connections between mechanics and other game language and the theme. It is also satisfying to finally have a completed game out in the world and the dreaded fear of never releasing anything in my life is now proven to be unfounded.

This was never going to be a popular game and with my lack of social media presence and whatnot there was no way it was going to reach many other people. As a developer that is something that I am going to need to be better at despite my anxieties about sharing things online.  This is important because though this is a bit of a nothing game for most people I think it uses parts of games (like the UI and the concept of an ending) for an artistic/meaningful goal. So having this and games like it be shared more widely and be more known will quicken the pace of artistic expression in game design and just adds to the tools that designers and artists have to convey things.

Just looking at the game as is though I don't think there is much else I could improve in terms of what I set out to do. The art and sound weren't really part of my skill set so, though I can think of ways to improve it that's not really something I am currently capable of doing. If I dig deeper and think about the coding and development side there are improvements to the process I can do to make future development easier/more efficient.

For example there were places where toward the end, I just fling-ed functionality where they probably shouldn't go but I think that is pretty standard for development. In the future I want to make that process a bit clearer. I recall spending some time umming and ahhing about whether or not to do the easy thing or the correct thing. In the end this decision might just be based on a feeling/instinct that is honed through experience but we'll see.

What I found quite interesting was finding out how much of the polishing of a game requires tweening or Linear interpolation of stuff. So all the pulsing, image fading and all that stuff that made things look/ feel slightly better is sort of rooted in that function. The problem is that applying a LERP function to different things is quite cumbersome. So in the future given how much of the last stage of development was just using tweens, I think I'll invest in an asset like DoTween pro instead of bothering to write all that stuff up myself.

A dumping ground for the future

Looking toward the future I'm not all that interested in updating this game. As is, I feel it is quite solid but if there were ever a time that I manage to come across an artist that can help me make the visual aesthetics better and more consistent, I am open to doing either a sequel or some kind of major revisit to this concept. So the rest of this blog will be here as a dumping ground for some ideas to make things a bit meatier.

1. NPCs and player sprites

One of the things I would have liked to do is have these sprites be randomised so that on each loop reset the player would be a different nameless character. I think this would still preserved all of the ideas currently displayed but it would have added the feel of revenge and anger as universal forces and drove home a bit more specifically the idea that each person the player inhabits and kills is an individual.

2. Improving the game aspect of the experience

Though I am OK with how the attack of the player is positioned such that they are forced to be on the lowest level of the disintegrating tiles to hit stuff, it is a bit cumbersome/frustrating from a gameplay point of view. So in the sequel I would want to solve this issue in some capacity. Not really sure how to combine that idea of forcing the player to be in the thick of it while allowing the them to shoot from above and whatnot... Perhaps it is just a matter of giving the player a melee and reduce the effectiveness of the ranged attack.

I think I would also want to make any kind of sequel or re-visit more of a game which requires thoughts to achieve things. So an interesting thing I learned interrogating a friend about how he came to reach the ending revealed that his thought process was him just trying to get past the first rectangle without killing them rather than anything else. This is fine as I think the game changing state in the middle of them trying to do something else should make the player think about what just happened and why. In the future though it might be worth exploring a gameplay loop that involves or at least acknowledges the players active attempts to not resort to violence. Though I am big into the use of inaction being more considered in game design.

3. Updating the Revenge Target

So the revenge target/ "boss" in this game just stands there and does nothing. This is meant to reflect that the revenge target has already reached the point that the player should when they are in their fallen sanctuary (i.e. resignation of the cycle of revenge they have initiated and must succumb to). The next game should probably have the boss' behaviour be randomised or perhaps be based on how quickly the player gets to the boss room. Oh and it would be a good idea to actually implement the Megaman style boss HP as part of the scenery this time around to go with the boss door and such.

4. Additional nuance

Any attempt at doing more stuff would mean adding nuance so research would need to be done on more specific forms of revenge. This might mean that there would be some kind of non-violent version of revenge? I think that would be a neat thing to explore though at the moment I find it hard to think about how this would work alongside the cyclical nature of the current design.