Devlog, part 4: what did we learn?

Hi. I think five or so people played this game, etc. etc. My understanding is that people thought it was okay, but as this is my biggest game ever(tm), I just wanted to do a postmortem and figure out what went wrong necessarily with this, and how to make a better game in the future.

First, and probably most importantly, I think that text games in this style need to have artwork. I attempted to draw art for the game and use a sort of art generation tool as well, but both of those went really poorly so I ended up cutting them and returning to the art-less world that I was most used to. This was done strictly so I could release anything by deadline, but I think the game suffered a lot from it. This stems purely from my inexperience as a game dev and artist.

Second - and this is actually in many ways more important than the first - I didn't dedicate the actual time required to make the game work before the sprint at the end. I needed to figure out how to add art prior to setting up the game as a whole - and I need, still, to figure out how to make a more effective plan on what to do, and to be able to do it over the time in the sprint. It's probable that I need to work in multiple sprints if this is going to be a hobby for me, where I just grind for a full day trying to pin down the actual coding part, and then grind to actually make the story/etc.

I'm happy with how the game turned out, even though it's a bit awkward in many spots, has a subject that's fairly rare in the jam that it's in, and is almost entirely a text adventure lacking the nuance of many of the other entries in the jam. In the end ... it's actually created, even with its flaws. And that's something to celebrate.

This is a Twine game, because I have used it for a lot of small text adventure-style games before so I have experience with it and love the 'overall' view. I'd love to switch to Renpy - I was hoping to do that for this game but it just simply didn't work with my level of knowledge and requirements for the game jam. I know many companies use this as a stepping stone to Unity. I have some Unity experience myself as well so it's possible that in the future I'll switch to one of those game engines fully for this style of game, and will be able to spend more time ensuring that I can use these new game engines in order to create the game I want to make.