Mage Arcade: Lessons Learned

///This devlog is a space where I tracked my progress with Mage Arcade. I didn't know when I first started writing it at the beginning of the project that so many things could change. The short version is: I edited the project down significantly to adapt to time constraints. ///

Mage Arcade is my first completed, published game. It was inspired by a motivation to learn how to code and make a game as a form of interactive storytelling. I submitted the game under the game jam #WizJam2k19, so I am also thankful for that community for pushing me to make a project in two weeks. 

I used Toggl to log a total of ~26 hours [Font: 1.5 hrs, Sound/Music: 2hrs, Art: 2.5 hrs, Design/Coding/Learning Godot: 20 hrs.]

The main things I wanted to learn and execute in this project were character movement, tracking collectibles, title screen, box pushing for puzzles, and making collectibles trigger narrative elements. 

On the one hand, I thought it might be too much to take on for my first game, but since the game is short, it was more a matter of building the base structure of the game loop, then building out from there. 

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About halfway though the project, on March 7th, I determined I might not be able to do all the things I wanted to do in the coming week. 

As I started to do more with the UI and Main Menu, I discovered the opportunity to do more with button presses and choice. I realized I could tell a story through the use of buttons and not worry so much about the mechanics of the game I had set out to make. First and foremost, I wanted to make a narrative-based game. The character movement and puzzles were secondary to that story.  

So, even though I've removed a lot of the mechanics I'd intended to include, the game feels more authentic to my style as an interactive story.  This is not something I would've stumbled upon had I not taken a break, enough time to look at the big picture and discover what I really wanted to convey with this game.

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On the 10th I decided to cut player movement and collisions. For whatever reason the collisions were working with some objects but not with others. I couldn't determine the source of this problem after several hours of troubleshooting, so instead of continual frustration I figured I'd make the game without it. 

Mage Arcade became a narrative-based, point-and-click game, built mostly around button presses and signals. Even this provided challenges, but I was determined to tell a complete story using these tool, no matter how messy the code and backend became. And while I don't think this is the right solution for all my games moving forward, knowing how to cut losses to conserve time and resources has been invaluable. 

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On the 14th, the final day, I finished the story and the music for the game. When I uploaded the game to itch.io as a HTML file, it would not load. After some tweaking, I've got the game to run, but after about 30 seconds of looking at a black screen. 

I've now been made aware that this delay is a common bug with newer versions of Godot. Since I'm on 3.1, that could be the reason. The game is still playable in this state, though not optimized.

I'm glad to have the game out in the world, but I expect to have be updating the game in the coming weeks as I figure out how to speed up the game's load time.

Thank you for reading,

Alan