This was my first released game to the public so there was a lot I’ve learned from this experience and how I could have made my game better than it was. I’ve always listened to post-mortems and I just realized I now have the chance to do one for myself and I wasn’t going to let that chance slip by.

What went wrong:

Bad introduction to mechanics

I had assumed that people would be willing to put in the time to understand that the character is blind and uses echo location. However, I made that assumtion because I told my friends to playtest it and they didn’t immediately stop because they knew it was my game. People on the internet aren’t as forgiving, many of them don’t want to put in the time to understand a game that they aren’t sure will be worth their time.

Difficulty

Due to the lack of levels the difficulty level ramps up extremely quickly. I’ve had reviews where people say “Great game, but I couldn’t get past the 2nd/3rd level. While I’m glad they played and enjoyed what they played that’s not enough for me. I wan’t to make an experience where the player is so compeled to play they are willing to put in the effort and time it takes to finish the game, like super meat boy.

Time constraints

I am a student which means that I don’t have a whole lot of time to work on side projects. Knowing this I tried my best to put all my time and effort over the holidays into making this game the best I could before school started. However, with such a hard constraint on myself, certain things have been a little rushed. This is mostly due to the fact that my work pipeline was wonky because I had no idea what I should have been prioritizing my time on.

What went** well:**

Unique Mechanics

I have a goal that I won’t make a game unless i’m sure that the idea is unique and interesting. That it will force the player to throw away some learned knowledge of game tropes. In this game that was, vision. The game itself, if you could see, is very dull and not interesting. However, the simple fact that you can’t see, that you have to move with echo location, changes the asthetics of the game of the game entirely for the better.

Making the player feel smart

Theres a lot of little tricks in the game that I never tell the player about. Some that I didn’t even know were possible until I saw some playtesters do them. However, it didn’t take away from the experience, it only added to them. I decided to embrace that. By doing so a lot of emergant gameplay came out of one little game, which is a very important thing for me to achieve.

Completed it

Its kinda obvious that I completed it but when I think about it i’ve never been happier. I have a bunch of games that I never released because I was scared that “they weren’t good enough”. I’ve learned otherwise, they may not always be a hit but I will learn soooo much more from releasing that game than I would otherwise. A game isn’t a game if it only exists for you.