Week 16 Status: Retrospective #1

This week I decided to make a break from game development. I’ve been working on a game for over a year now, and it is publicly available for almost 4 month. Today I want to share my thoughts on the past and the future of a game.

I want to highlight next problems with current state of the game development: tedious QA testing before release, lack of the content and progress, bad design choices (in terms of programming). These are main factors that significantly contribute to my desire to abandon the project. But there are solutions to these problems, and I want to try to solve them. Lets discuss each problem separately.

First problem is tedious QA testing before release. Since I develop game by myself, I have to test all things by myself too. With more and more content in the game, I have to test more and more things, so at this point each release takes at least 2 hours of playtesting and small bugs fixing. Most frustrating part is that many of these bugs are simple, such as missing researches in chains or missing unlocks for buildings. The main source of this problem is that quests, researches and many different things are tightly coupled with UI, and such components are hard to cover with tests. The solution to this problem is quite simple, and I’ve came to this realization only this week. I need to decouple from UI as much as possible components and cover them with unit tests (tests that does not require any UI elements). And for UI part, I need to integrate UI testing library, making another pass on decoupling stuff, because some parts of the game, such as building or demolishing UI, can’t be tested properly without UI. By eliminating this problem, development progress of a game will be significantly improved, lifting most annoying and exhausting part of the release cycle, manual testing. Instead of finishing game over and over again, I will press button and everything will be tested automatically, reducing time from several hours to just few minutes.

Second problem is lack of the content and progress. This problem is second in this list, but it was first one to arise. Whole year I was kinda “going with the flow”, without any particular goals in mind. This results in the problem where I can stay in one place for a long period of time. But still during there 4 months there was some progress. Also I’ve heavily rely on inspiration when things come to the art. I’m not so good with pixel art (and with other types of art too), so sometimes I have to wait for weeks until I came with some kind of ideas on new buildings look. I also tried to use AI (both textual and graphical), but it does not work well for this type of tasks. I think solution to this goal is to set deadlines and follow them at any cost. This is actually how I’ve made to release of this game - before it I’ve abandoned several game projects. But once I’ve set deadline and followed it, I had MVP at the end. With bugs and small content, but actual minimum viable product.

Last problem is bad design choices. This is due to the fact that I usually stick to optimization over readability, which, obviously, results in higher maintenance and development cost. But since I keep many things modular as possible, it should be not that hard to rewrite these parts into less optimal, but far more readable format.

Summary. These are three main problems that I have at this point. Right now I’m a little bit burnout with the project and want to take a break to work on different genre. Also in the next month I need to update my portfolio by updating my side project, and that would take some time too. It does not mean that game development will stop completely (at least for now), it means that I will spend much less time on this project. And I will keep posting status/update messages eventually. If I decide to stop game development, I’ll change game status from “in development” to “cancelled”. Until then development is in progress, even if I stop posting status/update messages. In the mean time you can reach me using discord server if you have any questions.