OWP - Pointless Postmortem

Let me start with my worst mistakes. My worst mistake was trying to do everything at once, by myself, and in the shortest time possible. If you value your sanity - don't ever do that.

Is started some years ago, before a hiatus, as yet another attempt to make an NES game. Soon into development I got the thought that there is no real benefit trying to code it under actual 6502 asm. I probably could, and the final game, with a few notable exceptions (shaders, some of the graphics), could've been done on NES, but it would've at least tripled the time needed.

I also wanted everything to be easily editable and open. It uses tiled formats for levels, generally available formats for graphics and music, and lua for scripting everything up to the render. There is hardcoding, but I tried to keep it to a minimum.

It was also full of weird choices. Initially I wanted to translate all the relevant information over text window in hud. You enter a chilly room and get the message - "There is a breeze". But it held too few characters and spamming the player with messages is not the way to go.

Another one - is forcing the player to equip all of the items before using them. Yes, it is a hassle, and if it had the actual Iga-vania number of items - it would've been a nightmare to manage. I am somewhat fond of games with weird inventory management, though.

Yet another one - starting the game mid-sentence. Have you ever noticed how most of the media starts their stories at the beginning and ends at an end? Yes, it is in the naming, but you never even get even a stray line of dialogue mid-sentence. And you never wonder - what happened before?

Mnahn was always supposed to start midway. One of the first mockups has the "and then I went into that alley" line.

Very late into development I got the feeling that I shot myself into a leg. By oversimplifying and getting rid of all that Int +5 Agi +3 numbers I left myself with nothing to fill the passive item pool. I think, I've managed to fill enough of the active items, but you probably will still prefer going through the game with the starting pistol. Or, if you're a hardcore player - a starting knife. Or, if you are insane - 1 damage fisticuffs.

Cutting room floor.
It was downsized by at least a half. As usual, out of necessity.
Several endings were scrapped. Whole dungeons were scrapped. Sad, but necessary.

The best feeling about all of this is when you understand that the item that you put there a week ago lines up perfectly with the 'puzzle' you're doing now. And they are already in perfect logical order. Seriously, it's great.

What I got out of it, is that starting to code a game is fairly easy. Making it playable throughout is very difficult. It's obvious, but it truly is.

I'm happy that I've done it, I will be even happier if someone likes it, yet it's a process that I'm very wary of repeating.