Postmortem

Truthfully I want to say that I have succeeded and grown from my time on this project, but I feel like that simply is not true: I personally feel as if in this class that I have failed.  There were a number of things I wanted to do, and in the end, I personally feel as if I have achieved none of them.  I do not believe that this game is indicative of my overall abilities as a game designer, I have plenty of work that I can put my pride into and say that I have done well.   I do not believe that what I set out to do was out of scope for this class, and if I changed my approach in certain regards, I feel as if I could have easily done what I set out to do.  At the end of this quarter though, all I can truly say is that I have failed, as a game designer, and on a personal level, regardless of my grade in this class.  I would have accomplished more of what I set out to do if I wrote a book rather than what I have turned in.  

Failure, as bitter as it tastes as I write it now, has taught me that I have limits, I can't code worth a damn, and that depending on the goals that I have in mind, my traditional approach (2D top down) is not how my game should be made.  If I wanted to make this story into reality, I should have done something more akin to a visual novel.  While it is not reflected here, I am a hell of an artist, and while I don't think I would be able to make an entire sprite sheet and animations for a game in this class, I am confident in my ability to produce at least a few truly wonderful screen wide spreads.  And while at this point the idea of me sharing my story to the world is laughable given the state that the game is in, I truly believed that I could have shown myself a competent storyteller too  As it is, I am proud of nothing but the guts I have for turning in such a shoddily made garbage that even the likes of Temu could not peddle.

My greatest individual failure however, was that I simply for the life of me, could not get the menu system to just work.  Making the text for it was time consuming, the text box itself would disappear when attempted to be centered, but the biggest pain of the whole debacle was its functionality.  At first, after I got to the point of testing it, it worked just fine, not a problem to be found. An unexpected happiness for sure, but a welcome one, and the sole one to be found in the coming weeks of hell I would endure. I added a sub menu, but it still works.  At this point I assumed I wouldn't need to touch it again.  However after I tried and failed to make a working text box after weeks.  I decided to cram what necessary the player needed to know in the menu.  I added another sub menu, for the story to play after the player starts, and a button to quickly start the game if one wants to simply play through the game.  Both worked.  Then I added one more, and all hell broke loose.  For whatever reason, buttons on every menu level were now active for every menu.  If the second option in a menu was to end the game, every second button on each menu ended the game, and for the life of me, I could not undo it.  There were no syntax errors, nothing wrong with the commands used.  So I deleted the changes, however whatever this behavior in menus persisted.  It got to the point where I rewrote the entire menu script, and still it just broke after a certain amount of sub-menus.

In the end, I expected to be able to make a game that can tell the story I had planned, and ended up making a game that can't.  I feel embarrassed, disappointed, and spiteful at myself for what I have done.  Knowing that I could have done better, but not having anything to show for it.  Despite all these disparaging and inflammatory statements towards myself and the work I have done this quarter, I don't want to shed myself in a pitiable light.  I messed up, I'll live and move on from it, but I'll learn from my mistakes here, and do better in the future.