Postmortem

Cecil's Adventures is a fan game that I intended to spend about one month making. My main reason for making it is that I'm working on a commercial game that I am going to release on Steam. The thing is, right now, even if you make a legitimately good game, the chances of it getting noticed or even seen are astronomically low if you don't already have an audience. So my strategy was to build up a presence online, specifically a Youtube channel. Part of my strategy involved making a series of fan games to hopefully attract the attention of various Youtube content creators that I follow, and more importantly, the attention of their audiences. The plan was for these content creators to notice my games, hopefully praise them, and that would cause many of their subscribers to check out my Youtube channel. Once my Youtube audience grew to a sufficient size, I would be able to release my game on Steam and actually have a snowball's chance in hell of selling a few copies.

So, one month to commit to completing this project. Not so bad, right? Did I get it done in one month? No. Two months? Nope. SIX months?? Uh...no. So how long did I take to get this rather unremarkable platformer finished? Thirteen months, eleven days.

So how did I blow my deadline by more than a year? A few things.

I insisted on using my own platformer engine. I had quite a few unfinished projects in Unity. A few of them were platformers. So the plan was to take one of these platformer projects and repurpose it for my game. Nearly zero effort, or so I thought. No, I ended up spending about four months trying to perfect it, and by the end of that four months it still wasn't that great. There was no wall jumping, because I couldn't figure out how to make that work. The moving platforms didn't work very well. The player would always move like he was walking through molasses while he was on one, and I was never able to resolve that issue. And don't even get me started on the ladder climbing mechanics. And the player respawn was a complete mess, as was the checkpoint system. I had to redo the checkpoint system near the end of development, because the one I had just stopped working, and I could not for the life of me figure out why. In the final month of development it occurred to me that I could have just spent $60 and got the Corgi Engine off the Asset Store. It's a complete platformer system that has every possible platform feature and works perfectly. I could have spent a week learning how it worked and the rest would have been creating artwork and designing levels. I'm still hating myself for not coming to that conclusion in the beginning. My advice to anyone looking to do a platformer: don't worry about re-inventing the wheel, just get the Corgi Engine or some similar thing, and concentrate on making great levels and great art.

I let the scope of the game spiral out of control. When I first started this, I intended to make something like Super Mario Brothers. Extremely simple and easy to make quickly. But by the time I finished spend four months working on the game mechanics, the ideas I had for the game had evolved, and the game I had in my head was more like Hollow Knight. I had fifteen massive levels planned out, with five boss battles. When I look back on it now, I don't know what I was thinking. When it finally dawned on me how crazy that was, after spending a ridiculous amount of time just making the first level, I scaled down to three levels and one boss battle.

My "motivation bar" was at zero. I realized very late in the development process that motivation is an expendable resource, just like time and money. You only have so much of it, and eventually, it will be depleted. When mine was depleted, my productivity level was rock bottom. It took forever to get anything done. I would constantly put things off. Something that should have only taken a few hours would sometimes take a week. The only reason I didn't just abandon the project all together is because I knew that this often happens to developers in the late stages of a big project, and many give up before completion. I did not want that to happen to me on my commercial project, so I knew that I had to prove to myself I could stick with it until the end, no matter how much I hated working on it.

So what are the takeaways from my experience on this project?
One, don't feel like you need to do all of the heavy lifting. If there's something at the Asset Store or somewhere else that will allow you the get your game done quickly and with much less effort, just do that. Don't worry that you think that you're cheating, because you're not. It's just working smart. And when you're a solo dev or even on a small team, you need to work as smart as possible.
Two, at the very beginning, determine as much as possible the exact scope of your game. Make sure that you've taken the time and consideration to determine how much time it will take to do, so that you know it can be accomplished in the time you have. And, then, DO NOT DEVIEATE from that. If you do, your development time could end up being many times what you originally planned and you may never finish.
Three, make sure that , just as with time and money, you also budget your motivation. Make sure that the project is manageable enough that you will be able to reach the end of it without hating what you're working on.

So, there you have it. My first large scale project. Am I happy with it? Not really. The art is not as good as I wanted it to be, the levels are kind of boring, and overall it's a buggy mess. But I've learned some extremely valuable lessons on what not to do going forward, and I've proven to myself that I can do a year long project and come out on the other side with a completed game. And I guess that's something.