Things I've learned making games | an almost post mortem

I've been working on A Stay at the Aftercastle since the start of June, starting learning game dev in April with Godot. Since that time I've learned so much, became a better programmer, and even learned pixel art! But the question in the back of my mind is; what would I do differently?

In my next game I plan on learning from my mistakes I made with Aftercastle, here are a few of those things and hopefully they help some aspiring game devs.

1. UI Planning

This has been my bane, with the recent ui update I learned the importance of planning. I threw the UI together with no plan, just adding as I go and it took a while to sort out the mess. I will be doing ui drafts and getting feedback so I don't end up with such a mess in the future

2. Mechanics Planning

Getting the damage numbers, the scoring, the health item etc was a huge pain. Not because these things are hard to implement but because I threw in numbers at random and sifted through all my feedback and tweaked as I went. I feel I could have saved a few hours of all this by simply sitting down and planning what I wanted

As in all things a good balance is required. So I wanted to talk about what I have done right with Aftercastle

1. Kept Feature Creep at Bay

Lots of indie devs struggle with the dreaded feature creep. If you are unaware of what that means it's when you start out making a racing game, then end up with Grand Theft Auto but with dragons through a series of "Oh this would be cool" or "I should add this!"

2. The art

I am pretty proud of the art in the game, despite me not being an artist I'm very happy with my progress that I've made since April 2020. I went from unidentifiable blobs to crude but recognizable pixel art

Anyways that is it for now, I hope you enjoyed. I didn't see that Minds had a blog option and wanted to try it out, would do better here than on my website or should I upload to both? Let me know!

Thanks for reading,

John the Terminal Goblin