Postmortem

My video game “Paçoquinha” is a 2D Metroidvania platformer that puts the player in the role of a capybara collecting passion fruit and defeating the machinery that tries to destroy the Amazon forest.

This game serves as a reflection of some of my personal goals as a game designer, which is to learn to develop complex game genres. The game was a way to improve my skills in planning and developing, and it helped as a way to express my creativity while taking inspiration from the Brazilian culture to create this game.

During the development process, I could perceive the strengths and flaws of my design practices, especially assigning deadlines, time management, and understanding the actual performance of my skills. Some issues appear during the weeks, and they reflect on which area I am required to change or improve so I can deliver the expected results. An example of this happened when I was assigning the estimated time to complete the design of a mechanics or an animation sprite, which usually took more time than expected.

Other things I learned throughout this process are to be realistic about the goals for this game and what’s possible according to my skills and resources. If I had just known how difficult some mechanics may be, I could have gotten better preparation and put more emphasis on getting the necessary things for the video game, getting more prioritization of the core mechanics for the first versions.

For my design process, I tried to organize it according to the deadline of the dev logs we had to give during the quarter and assign bi-weekly goals, and daily objectives to keep progress. This decision was made to keep a rhythm fitting the deadlines of every prototype instead of the part of the game that required more attention, which worked sometimes.

I start with a raw prototype of how the mechanics of the game would be; then, I focus on the design of the player and the environment, always trying to focus on the functionality; on the third prototype I began to pay attention to the artistic details like the animations and tile sprites, but I also add other concepts like a collectible system, different cameras for the player and life stats; and for the final prototypes I focused on the necessary things to have the minimum requirements to be presented as a final product, so I focused on the music, UI, a boss fight, and the improvement of other mechanics.

I’m proud that I can deliver a functional game with just a few errors, but it reached the expectations for this project. I’m so happy about the assets I designed and how the game went during the playtesting, these were some of the issues that constantly stressed me, but I’m glad that they worked without any inconvenience.

Maybe things didn’t go as expected, especially in the time length of the development of some parts of the game, but I’m proud and amazed at how I managed to get things done right on time and according to the due dates. This taught me sometimes the plans won’t work as expected, and it’s important to adapt to the circumstances.

Talking about things that didn’t go as expected, a lot of the goals established at the beginning of the development process weren’t fulfilled correctly. I got a project planning that had a lot of mistakes in terms of time length and how long certain activities could take to be done, for example, some actions like creating a combat system or the creation of life stats required more time and attention, which affected other parts of the process.

Even though I was able to adapt to the inconveniences during this quarter, I didn’t reach my expectations. This was because I was aiming for big goals and trying to replicate other games that follow the same genre, but I realized that it would require more time than I had for this project, so it was better to only focus on the foundations to make a proper video game. After 11 weeks of developing the video game “Paçoquinha”, if I were able to change anything about my development process, I would not have the knowledge and understanding that I have right now. However, maybe I would like to be more realistic about my personal goals at the beginning of the process, be more consistent with the creation of the assets, and try to look more over functionality rather than perfection. This would’ve helped me to complete the expected goals for every prototype and probably get a better game for the final release, but I’m amazed at what I was capable of creating in a matter of almost 3 months.