Over the past few months the game studio I'm a part of, STAG has created and now released their first game, Cheese Clout. I only just released it, but I thought I would already do a post mortem, as I feel I have a lot to reflect on.
Deadlines
There are 4 people in the studio (give or take), which may sound like plenty to develop a game, but we are all extremely busy people, so between us we aren't able to get much work done.
From what I can gather, I have the most free hours out of anyone, but I've learned that just because I have more time doesn't mean more can be done. I was often in a position where I wanted to add more, but didn't have the assets from the team to add it. That's not to say anything bad, people are simply busy, so it's not always that easy. We originally planned to develop the game in a single month, which we did on purpose, we scoped it so that the deadline was possible.
Error Handling
Something I'm proud of from making Cheese Clout is the error handling (that I know of). I created a module called "stagerror," which behaves differently depending on how the game is being played. I set a flag called IS_RELEASE to control this. If we're not in release mode, we want to catch every single error as it comes, so we use panic to get the developer's attention. However, as a user, this is a terrible way to play a game, having it crash all the time. Because of this, in release mode we don't hard error, we just write to a log file in the background and try to continue on as best we can. Cheese Clout has a primitive version of this, and I'm still getting better at using this module, but a great example for its use would be images. If the game is missing one image, I don't want it to crash and be unplayable, instead, it should log out that it's missing an image.
Level Editor
Right now, I haven't released the level editor for Cheese Clout. I will have that out soon (if I remember), especially since it's a great part of the game to be able to make and play your own levels. The level editor isn't that great. It works, but I wish I had spent more time making it nicer, such as making the text boxes more convenient, and just a bunch of other ease of use features.
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