Postmortem

Successes

          One thing that went absolutely right was the animation. I spend a lot of time on the character animations, especially the player character, it was drawn frame by frame, extra attention was even paid to small details such as how the hair flaps around when the character is walking or falling. The character movement, how it walks, jumps, runs, fights and how these movements are related to stamina, is a core mechanic of the game, as well as something I put a lot of time into. It is not perfect, and to be fair I would go more indepth if I could, but I think I have reached the level of "depth" that is appropriate for this project, the character control is smooth, and it works well with the pacing I wanted for the game.  

          Last but not least, I enjoy how the levels came out. There are certain aspects that can be improved upon, but I think there is a good variety of different types of levels and difficulties that the game doesn't feel repetitive, overly easy or difficult.

Setbacks

          Spending too much time on the core mechanic (that being the player character movement & animation), does have its cons. I think this more or less led to that towards the end of development I just felt kind of drained. It was a lot of pressure to try to match the rest of the game with the player character in terms of details, and I failed to deliver. Other characters have significantly less frames-per-second in their animations.  A lot of compromises had to be made too. For one, I had to dial down on the difficulties because I just couldn't get certain codes to work the way I wanted. I also had to give up some of the storytelling elements I had planned due to time constraints, I will talk about this in detail in "Lessons." The end product had a lot of bugs as well, nothing game breaking, but really annoying, and I never figured out how to fix them(again, perhaps lack of time, since they were not game breaking I didn't put them as priorities), for instance, sometimes onLoad players may have their health locked and won't take damage, but it fixes itself on another load, and I had not identified the cause yet.

Lessons

          The biggest takeaway I have is time management. The development (especially the early stage) lacked planning, I knew what I wanted to do but didn't planned everything in detail, and had underestimated the amount of time required for each task. I also didn't really construct a detailed design document as my development guide since I had to make a lot of things up/change things on the go. So definitely going to plan better next time. 

          I also just learned some new coding stuff, before I always just used the most basic C# while trying to make complex things out of them, it worked but just wasn't very efficient. For certain things I did in this game I just learned better ways to do them.

Next Steps

          The biggest regret I have is the rest of the game not matching the quality of my player character. If given the opportunity, I would spend more time on that aspect. Perhaps hand drawn all the level sprites, rather than using simple sprites that came with Unity.  Maybe even more enemy types, interactable items, and more in-depth controls.

          I also would have implemented more sound effects and music, rather than just having one track play in the background. For different levels and different parts of the levels I would have used different tracks to better render the atmosphere and tone.