Verily Postmortem

The Verily Postmortem

After nearly a year, I have finally been able to release Verily. I no longer have to think about this game every day. It can no longer haunt my every waking hour of recreation that I choose to spend not engaged in actively developing it. What began as a small project to make a quick old-school RPG with my daughter over Christmas break turned into a year long slog of creative pain. Now that there are a couple of days distance between Verily and myself, I want to make a quick blog post to reflect on the experience.

What went right

• I think the core gameplay loop is fun. The core gameplay loop in this case is working your way through a dungeon, saving up money, buying upgrades, then diving back even further into the dungeon. The combat system is simple, but involving. I'm happy with how it all turned out.
• I was able to recreate several staples of old DOS roleplaying games: Line of sight/fog of war, secret rooms, pressure plates, and teleporters. If you've ever played an RPG in 1992, chances are you bumped up against one or more of those concepts, and I'm glad I was able to include them in Verily.
• The tutorial. One of the big problems with my previous games was that they were not terribly intuitive, and they relied on players reading the help documentation to understand how to play. Verily is, I think, a little more intuitive, but I think is also aided by the inclusion of a tutorial level. By the conclusion of the tutorial level players will know how to attack things and cast spells, which is to say they have everything they need to know to play the game. This sort of thing is probably going to be a staple in my games going forward.
• In the latter stages of game development I brought my wife into the project to generate a couple of the levels for me, and that was a tremendous help overall. For various reasons, I specifically try to keep my game development as solo as possible. Mostly because I don't want to have to rely on anyone but myself. Ultimately though, when a game gets to a certain size I just can't handle the mental bandwidth required to do everything and it just really helps to be able to offload some of the tasks. Luckily, Unity's 2D tile palette functionality makes the barrier to entry on level editing very low, and my wife was able to jump in and help without much hand holding required on my part. It worked out great.
• Being something that I worked on over the course of nearly a year, I can see character sprite artwork that I worked on day one alongside sprite artwork that I worked on day 300, and everything in between. In other words, I have a visual record of my (admittedly low level) art skills improving and becoming more sophisticated over the course of a year. I don't think I've ever been able to see something like that before, and I find it rewarding to see practice paying off like that.
• It got released. Finally. This one may feel like a cop out, but to me it feels like a very significant accomplishment. Bruce Campbell once said of making low budget movies something along the lines of "B-movies don't get released, they escape". After my experience with Verily, I feel like I can safely say the same thing about indie games. Verily isn't the first game I've ever released, but it is the first in a good long while, and I forgot just how grueling that final push to release is. Morever, Verily *is* the largest and most complex game I've ever released. Game developer/Youtuber Miziziziz described releasing a game as being a skill in and of itself, and as such you need to practice doing it and getting experience with it. This is all to say that I'm happy that I was able to see Verily out the door.

What could have been better

• On a technical, Unity specific, note: if I was doing it all over again I would have used additive scenes in Unity in place of Gameobjects marked with "Don't Destroy on Load". I used "Don't Destroy on Load" for the main game manager, which technically works, but it is a pain in the butt trying to constantly make sure that the game manager stays a singleton, and specifically destroying it in certain instances. It would have been a simpler and cleaner thing to put the game manager in its own additive scene, and just load or unload the scene as I needed it.
• Also on a technical, Unity specific, note: I chose to make every level in the game its own scene, and this was a mistake. I like the concept of separating the levels into scenes in a conceptual and organizational way, but in practice it feels cumbersome to work with. I think a better approach would have been to have a single "game" scene and instantiate the maps within that.
• I should have brought in more help on the game, sooner. As I mentioned in the "what went right" section, I eventually brought my wife on board to help out with some map making for Verily. It may seem obvious that having more people work on a project is something of a force multiplier over doing it all yourself, but I was determined to do this entire thing solo at first. On my next project, I'm going to make sure that, as early as possible, I'm going to have tools available to get help making content for the game.
• Verily didn't come into focus as a full playable game until the last two or three weeks leading up to release. I was coding, slapping down levels, and generating art and sound effects for a game that I really couldn't playtest all that much of, right up until near the release. It just always felt like I was missing some feature before I would be comfortable letting somebody try it out. This is obviously a terrible way of going about doing things. On my next project, I want to focus on having something playable as soon as possible, and be less worried about having something fully featured. This will make it easier to iterate on the game, and ultimately should make the release process much easier, as I will be releasing the game in multiple small iterative chunks all along until it is totally finished.

I never did have a lot of expectations for Verily. Ultimately, this is all just a hobby for me, and I'm happy to release games like Verily for free as long as somebody is there to play it. It has definitely been a learning experience, and I already have plans to take those lessons with me onto my next project. My next project, which I really, really, really hope doesn't take up another year of my life.