Whew... Development is done with things seemingly (KNOCK ON WOOD) bug free! I just want to share my thoughts throughout the development of my game!

Firstly, the idea, it just kinda came up to me really quickly and I decided to keep it mostly small in scope, compared to my other game jam game, THE GUN-TIST. I feel like I spent too long trying to come up with an idea during that jam, contributing to certain planned features not being implemented and the nail-biting 10 seconds before deadline submission. That was not fun. I'm glad that despite me joining the Mini Jame Gam a few hours late I was able to not repeat those same mistakes and was able to submit my game well on time, at least to me at least. That isn't to say that all my ideas were implemented though. The people were supposed to be guards and you'd have to not be caught by them, the Souls would be a resource so you could turn invisible to prevent getting caught by the guards. I also decided against a running (and scrapped WASD movement in general) animation and opted in having the people stand still... and I didn't even get to make an actual goal sprite. Oops.

Despite all of that, the game was made mostly how I imagined it and I'm 100% happy with how it turned out.

Secondly, the time-management,... was probably better this time around. For THE GUN-TIST, I stayed up to finish it because I didn't put my whole focus into the game. In the original jam version, the game had absolutely no sound and music. Even though I STILL stayed up to finish Soul Escape, I got a lot more done than what I got done in THE GUN-TIST, like actually having music and SFX when I first release it and not later. One issue is that at the start of the jam when I was porting over some prebuilt systems I created, I had to edit the code, taking time away from actually DEVELOPING the game, and killing my flow since it was mostly debugging why my rainbow text was now black or editing a previous system to work with a different system. By the time that was all fixed and working I didn't really have any drive to keep working on the game that day, meaning that day was only spent debugging...

Still, was able to do what I wanted, so I'm happy with that at least.

Thirdly, the code, I did not learn anything from THE GUN-TIST. At all. I feel like at the beginning it was going well, but as the deadline approached, my code and asset browser got messier. Probably not as messy as THE GUN-TIST, but still pretty messy. This is one thing I wasn't happy about and something I want to improve on in the future. Here's a little snippet of what I'm talking about... WARNING it is NOT PRETTY.

That wraps up my postmortem! If you've played my game, or plan to play my game, I hope you had or will have as much fun as I did creating it!

-wown00b