Postmortem; Thoughts on what worked, what failed, and what to keep in mind

In the previous DevLog, I mentioned that THIS DevLog would be an update focused DevLog. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, it's now turning into a Post-mortem.  We'll include my time management skills under the 'What didn't work' heading.

Before we get too far into the Post-mortem, I'm going to summarise the results of the Testing Session held for the last web-build. I didn't get many respondents to the survey used,  so the overall opinions that I can draw from the results are fairly limited; so I will be supplementing this information with my own direct observations of the players, and how they approached the game.

Starting with the difficulty; most of the respondents found the game difficult. This was also true of the players I observed directly, who had additional feedback indicating that the overall gameplay was easy enough to pick up, but difficult to keep up with (Barring one player who found it quite simple and quipped, "So, when does the game end?").

The thoughts provided on the art-style were unanimous; the art-style resembles that of a retro-style PC game, is very consistent and technical, and appeals to the target audience (The target audience being "Casual gamers, ages 13 and up, with interests in pixel art, turn-based games and puzzles"). The feedback regarding the character designs was positive as well, with only one suggestion for an alteration being provided. The alteration suggestion was to give the UndeAAd evil little eyes, which if I had the time, I'd love to do as it would bring the in-game UndeAAd in-line with the UndeAAd on the title screen.

There wasn't anything that people suggested that they wanted removed from the game, but everyone that played it wished there was some form of audio for it, and I'm forced to agree. Some audio would've been wonderful to included.

With that done; on to the Post-Mortem proper. There were lots of things that worked really well. The game concept is fun. The art-style I settled on and the turn-based game play were both well received by the players. There were only a small handful of things that went wrong. When it came time for the weekly checkpoints for the game's development, there wasn't really much to 'play' or poke around in until far too late in development to get player feedback.  I would've liked to get something playable ready much sooner than I did, however because so many of the 'moving' parts were co-dependant, it wasn't really possible. Even just the basic player movement depended on the PathNodes used to simulate the movement grid, and the code for moving characters playing nicely together (Or at the very least not causing Unity to crash constantly).

I feel like the complexity of the game, behind the curtain, was both to its' benefit as well as its' detriment. Had I more time, because of the way the scripts were designed, it would be relatively simple to add additional features (More levels, more enemy types, etc). I see that as something that worked quite well, given I had very little practical knowledge of programming in C# at the beginning of this project. I don't see myself programming up anything super-complicated in the near future, but I certainly imagine that what I've learned on this project will be useful when I do.