The journey to v0.2, or: What I did last Devtober

Hi friends! Thanks for checking out my little prototype. I hope you had some fun with it. This is a post-mortem for the first major update (v0.2), which was created during Devtober 2022.

The outcome

As a game, Informash is a strange little creature. It's a Metroidvania, or at least it's going to some day be one - but it's a bit plot-heavy, and set on the Web of all places. Specifically, the web of the late 2000s. That's far enough in the past to be dated, but not far enough to be retro.

Science fiction often talks about the future as a way of talking about the present. It's often the same with nostalgia-driven media, I think. The decade that sees the most retro media (the 1980s) kicked off a lot of the trends that affect us today - I think that's part of why we see so much of it. Something similar is true for the web of the mid-to-late 2000s, and oh boy do I ever have opinions on that one.

Also, the aesthetics are fun.

Before this round of #Devtober, I had a prototype that was playable, but had a lot of broken and badly balanced systems. The game didn't end so much as just stop. There wasn't even a final boss battle!

At the end of this month... well, the story still ends where it did before, but it feels less abrupt now. There's more of a set-up for future expansion (including some teasers in the game itself). I've also excised some of the jokes that really didn't work, and polished up some of the graphics.

What went right

• I took some time at the beginning of this product to set up some proper source control. That really paid dividends here - when I inevitably ended up breaking the product, it was easy to reset it to a known good state and resume work.
• Similarly, this enabled me to experiment way more. I think that's good.
• Focusing on polishing up existing content rather than adding more was the right decision, I think (see below). Having a shorter but more functional experience is better than a longer but totally broken one.
• I got some great feedback on the first release of this project. Working it in to this one has definitely improved it. (Would love to hear your thoughts, by the by.)

What went wrong

• Bad time management. That's the big one! I ended up having to scale back my ambitions, from adding a whole new chapter on top of all the technical fixes, to just polishing up the existing one. At least the base game is in a better state now.
• Speaking of these technical fixes, I got a little lost in the weeds there.
• I held off on cross-platform testing until it was almost too late. As a result, the Windows version had a serious bug that would cause the game to crash within 2-3 seconds of starting. Whoops! Lesson learned: Start testing early, dummy.
  

What went wrong

I definitely want to continue working on this game. The finished product will proably have 3 chapters of roughly even length, for 1-2 hours of play time. That seems like a good goal to work towards.

Another thing this approach taught me: Iteration and feedback work way better than trying to develop a huge project sitting alone in your basement. Community matters, it turns out!