Post-Mortem

This post was originally written as issue nine of my newsletter, Read Only Mini, but I thought there was nothing better than to share it here too! For the longest time when I've come to the end of a project I've put together a short post-mortem to help me look back and reflect. Ordinarily I wouldn't share this kind of thing and I'm terrified of it being seen as totally self-indulgent tosh but I thought I'd put it out there for anyone interested in the process of putting a small game like mine together.

Context

Firstly, some context. I don't necessarily have any concrete experience in game-making, I dabbled a lot with basic tools like RPG Maker as a curious kid and towards the end of school/beginning of college bought a ton of books and tinkered with C# (nothing that I feel particularly comfortable calling proper understanding of programming and such) but have since completely forgotten. When the current pandemic began I re-cultivated my interest in games by putting together Read Only Magazine, the first issue in an ongoing zine series where I wrote essays about games. I started cracking on with the next issue almost straight away but, obviously, the second issue still hasn't come out yet. So what happened?

Essentially, I was growing more and more ambitious with what I could do with the next issue of the magazine. I'd taken on more than I thought I was capable of with the first issue and my initial plans for the second involved interviews, comic strips, articles etc. I reached out to a couple people with requests for an interview and was very graciously turned away and I think at that point I'd realised I'd bitten off a little more than I could chew. It was around this time, however, that I'd rediscovered game-making. I'd been fiddling a little with interactive fiction engines such as Inform and Twine and had been growing warmer to the idea of putting my own game together to include with the magazine in some way. I made decent headway learning Inform before I grew frustrated with my work and put it down for a bit.

As the pandemic drudged on, I unfortunately contracted COVID and once again had a lot more time spent at home. I was really sad for a lot of that time but it proved very reflective and I thought a lot about what I wanted for my future. Soon(ish) after I recovered, I decided that I'd go back to my roots in writing and apply for a Masters in Creative Writing at an institution in the UK. Doing so allowed me to choose a medium to lean on and study throughout the course and I chose to focus on the poetry route of the course. It's been a long time since I've written any poetry that I've been happy enough with to share, so I fretted quite a bit about the portfolio of work I'd be required to submit. I needed to send up to 15 written poems to apply and I wanted some way to stand out. I'm not 100% sure when, but at some point I decided that with my renewed interest in video games, the best way I could stand out would be to put together a digital portfolio and release it as a short video game.

How it all happened

I'd been eyeballing Bitsy for a while as someone as technically incapable as me, but I don't think that it was until I'd realised how easy it was to draw graphics in the program and slot them into place that I seriously considered it. I'm really drawn to things that 'look' good so it was important to me to at least seem plenty more capable than I actually am at drawing and implementing graphics, which is where I've stumbled in the past at trying to learn game-making programs.

I learned how to use Bitsy and wrote the content of the portfolio pretty much simultaneously with one another. I started off with Claire Morwood's excellent Bitsy tutorial and went from there, building the beach and train track scenes from the beginning of my game to play around with.

When it became more and more apparent that my game was going to be about the environments just as much as it was going to be about the written work, I decided to write strict form haiku to populate the world. I've always felt more comfortable writing within restrictions so this seemed like a natural choice. I've always loved the haiku form's connection to places and moments and given my game was becoming more and more about places and moments, it felt like a fit. I knew that I'd burn myself out somehow if I got ahead of myself putting the game together so I restricted myself to the bare basics while I finished writing the poetry before designing the other environments that would follow on.

After I felt comfortable enough in Bitsy and had finished writing all of the poems, I started implementing them into the areas I'd already created. Generally speaking, I picked the poems I felt would be the best fit for each given area but after I'd plotted the environments for the rest of the game, I tagged a poem for each area and would add them as I go. Doing these processes (the writing and designing symbiotically) was a godsend for my productivity and really helped me shape the direction of the game in a way I probably wouldn't have been able to do if I'd divorced the two tasks from one another. If I'd done either first I felt I would've gotten frustrated and given up pretty soon after starting but having another, different type of work waiting for me whenever I was at the end of my tether with my current thing made it really easy to keep the work rolling.

The poem 'objects' in the game are tagged as “glimmer” and are collectibles you pick up and keep after reading the poems. This was the way it was going to be from the outset and came from a number of places. In my undergraduate studies I was part of a team that pitched a magazine marketing idea wherein we'd produce poetry advertising the magazine and leave them in messages in bottles around Coventry for people to pick up, find and share with people. I've always been attached to this idea and this seemed like the most natural digital extension of that. Also, I'd recently finished playing Moon Remix RPG around the time I put this portfolio together (you can read a tiny review I wrote here), the basics of that game revolve around solving peoples' problems and collecting their 'love' in order to progress. I adored this idea of a game all about affecting positive change and growing stronger with peoples' love and this played a big part in how I implemented the glimmer in the game.

It was important to me that a player's experience reading the poems was as fleeting and transient as the moments described in the poems, as this is a very core tenet of strict form haiku and (I feel) adds to the poignancy of the work. It adds to the dream-like atmosphere of the overall piece, feeling like something you experienced but no-one else was around to see. I really liked the preciousness of that.

The overall atmosphere was inspired by long walks home I would take in the first year of my undergraduate degree. I was quite generally sad at that point in my life and quite frankly desperate for something to happen and change the way that I felt about myself. It was in a lot of this time that I was able to write most of my older poetry, seeing the empty city transform at night and bleed into the suburbs along my walk I thought was really beautiful and led a lot of my work back then. Maybe it was because circumstances had made me feel similarly useless that I felt such an affinity for that time again but, either way, it was very useful inspiration.

I'm more than a little ashamed to say that I put the music together in less than a day. I have absolutely no professional experience in digital audio workstations and only the most basic remaining knowledge of musical instruments, let alone putting music together. I really love ambient electronic music and wanted a mood piece to lead the journey the player was going on but didn't really have the know-how to do it. I ended up putting the task off for so long that it was on the day I intended to launch the portfolio game that I ended up cracking out my MIDI keyboard and get to work on the music. I downloaded a free workstation and watched a Youtube tutorial on how to navigate it and fiddled around with instruments.

This is an aspect of the game I'd only call half-successful at best. I originally wanted a much more somber piece, but it was only by chance that it became as floaty as it is now. I realised in putting it together that it's really quite difficult to write any ambient music that isn't frankly grating. Since the game was so dependent on a player paying as much attention as possible to the writing and the graphics, I tried to make the instruments as soft as I possibly could. Ultimately, I think the music inadvertently made the game a lot more dreamy than I'd originally intended but I think that it was much better that way.

Getting it out

I launched the game on itch.io, largely because that's where I've been hosting most of my current writing work but also because that's where I felt the audience for something as weird as the thing that I'd made would be. I've played and enjoyed lots of small games on there over the years so I thought by hosting it on there and tagging it appropriately I might find a proper audience.

While my initial intentions weren't ever to have people other than university admissions see what I'd made, I was proud of what I'd managed to do and was looking for feedback on the writing, really. Despite having done an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing, I have absolutely no confidence in my written work and that's held my progress back for a number of years now, releasing this in a proper fashion, I felt, would help give me a boost before I (hopefully) started studying again.

I shared the game to my social media channels and thanks to some really lovely people sharing it, reached plenty of people I would never have reached otherwise. I'm not 100% sure if it's completely responsible to share this kind of info but my itch.io has never had particularly great numbers, but the 7 days after my game released saw my profile reviews double (into the triple digits no doubt!) and I had a decent number of 'browser plays' on the game. I've only had positive notice on the game at this point but my brain will still only allow me to believe that this is people being polite, more than anything.

How it all went

Looking back, I'm still proud of what I made. It's been somewhere between 11 & 12 weeks (at time of writing) since I applied for my masters course and still have yet to hear back (that many weeks!!) so I can't say yet that this project has helped me be successful on that front but at the very least it was something to do and put out.

Next time, I feel that I would focus and work harder on the overall 'look' of the game. There were various points that I grew frustrated with my work on the graphics in the game (the cranes took a mighty long time to get right) and would put the work down for a while but now that I've finished something, I feel more confident that if I work harder at it I can make something a bit more polished.

While Bitsy had the right limitations for that project, I don't know that I have the know-how to stretch it so far that I could make my work look any more detailed than I already did here, which would probably mean looking for something else to make video games with (which frankly terrifies me), but I'm looking forward to giving it a crack. I'll still use Bitsy now and then if an idea comes to mind but the ideas I have kicking around right now will need something a bit more robust.

What's next

I've got the bug! Now that I've made and 'done' something I'm looking for the next thing. I'm happy to say that writing all of this has made me feel a lot better about my work and I don't think I'll be quite as hard on myself in the future. I've picked up a lot of the work that I'd started on the second issue of my magazine and am happy to say that my next game will probably feature in there by the time it releases and will also probably be made with the interactive fiction engine Inform.

It will be a tiny detective game with a nice little twist and I can't wait to share it when it's done!

Now to go and start it...

I hope that anything here has been useful, helpful or at the very least nice. I still feel silly writing and sharing any of this but people were so kind about what I made I felt like I owed the world something! So here you are. Stay safe and stay well.