Alcove Ranch Alpha Postmortem
So I'm writing a post mortem for an alpha version of my first attempt at a game. If you can guess by the first sheepish sentence, it didn’t go too well. I’m kind of ashamed at how long it took me to produce the little turd that was produced, but it was an invaluable lesson.
Between making Alcove Ranch and the countless developer talks from Team Meat and Jonathan Blow and Vlambeer and many others I’ve grown a lot as a developer and a gamer, and I’m so excited to work on something smaller in scope than what this game was supposed to be and do it the right way: Prototype with programmer art and making blocks fun to move.
You can download Alcove Ranch from my itchio site here.
Also there is a devlog for the game .
This is my first postmortem, so I kind of winged it, but I think there might be a few valuable pieces of info from one new developer to another. Hopefully you enjoy!
Explain what 5 goals, features or aspects of the project went off without a hitch or better than planned.
The time system. I didn’t do much work on it because it was so similar to the system I had implemented many times before in Rm2k.
The biology and behavior systems were actually fairly easy to implement as well, although I can’t take a whole lot of credit for the idea because I borrowed the design from games like tamagotchi. I think the object oriented nature of Game Maker made things very easy to partition out. Dividing Deity code into different behavior states made the code easier for me to understand, if the Deity is “Hungry” than this code happens, if he’s happy and it’s between x hour than he’ll want to “Sing” and then this code happens. I learned a lot about State based behaviors that I don’t think I would’ve picked up on had I done another project for my first game.
The UI of Alcove Ranch, while clunky, was also fairly easy to do. I don’t think I would have done it the same way if I reprogrammed the interface, but for what it is it was very easy to create using looping variables and timers.
The art style went through a few iterations and was never fully fleshed out or realized, but I do think that the character art was endearing and lent itself properly to the style of game I was going for. I learned how to animate with this game using a program called Pyxel Edit. Such a scaled back bare bones animator with layers simple pixeling tools, an invaluable tool in my art creation.
I did like the animations I used for the deities, I thought they were really good for my first try at making a game with neat animations. I thought that my designs were pretty solid for the art style I was going for, and I think that if I continued to develop Alcove Ranch I would definitely continue the same art style as far as characters go.
Particle effects! I had never worked with particle effects before, and I thought they would be the hardest thing to do, but I surprised myself with how fast I picked them up. If you can get the Deity to sing there are some great custom music note particles that I designed, trippy colors and all. I was so proud of those things. Oh, and the groovy stars that come out when a Deity evolves.
Explain what 5 goals, features or aspects of the project were problematic or failed completely.
Poor planning is probably the reason I got burned out on Alcove Ranch. I though, ‘Oh, I’ll just make a gotchi-like game and just keep adding things here and there and it’ll form organically.’ That sounded calm and comforting in my mind, but when I went to put fingers to the keyboard it was so disorganized after the first week or so of development. About 70% of what is in the current Alpha build of the game was done in maybe a week and a half, if I’m going to be honest with myself (code wise). I had no real direction, so I iterated on the game idea but kind of kept making the same game as I was going on, if that makes sense. Then when I hit walls, they felt extra damaging to my momentum, because I had developed this entropy style of development that wasn’t getting me anywhere.
I could never get a good sense of space as far as the environment went, and I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that I never settled on a framework for the game. I kept feature creeping and then scaling back my ideas when I realized how much time it was going to take implement features x,y,z, etc. This leads to a pretty big problem that i had in general.
I tried to take on too much with this project. I wanted it to be this extremely involved game where the environment helped dictate how the deity would grow, and where you could venture out into the world and deal with these random interactions with the environment and indigenous population of the island. I wanted there to be a battle and speed tournaments and beauty contests, i wanted the game to be a mix of all my favorite games, and its the first damn game I've ever made! I learned a lot about state systems, and from the other systems I didn't reveal in the alpha, that'll carry over to my next project that I'm going to work on.
I spent way too much time making art assets. I wanted the game to be personal, I wanted it to look neat and and inviting. I wanted the assets to be developed at the same time I was coding. I thought all of this was organic, but really it just led to a grueling pace where if I was stuck on a problem I’d develop some art or work on the “style” of the game. Really I should’ve used more programmer art and just worked on systems and making a fun game with blocks and circles.
Development of the current state of the game took about seven months. That's a long time for the little amount of progress and product to show for it, and that's why i decided to at least put the project on hiatus. I realized that i was getting diminished returns on the production of Alcove Ranch, and that my motivation and vision had burned out on the project. I'm not letting this get my down, and I'm using this postmortem as a self reflective lessons learned, possible help for some fledgling new.