O Kraken My Kraken: February Postmortem

In 2022 I set a goal to ship a new game every single month. I've dreamed about making indie games for way too long and decided it's time to just get started. My thinking is that a month is plenty of time to make a high-quality small concept, and I thought this would be an excellent forcing function for improving on all the elements of indie game development from end-to-end.

For the month of February Coopal00ps and I are thrilled to launch our game, "O Kraken My Kraken!". It was a lot of firsts for both of us: first game shipped together, first time using physics and tilemaps, first time making original music, first time using fluid simulations, and much more. We are super proud of what we've made in such a short period of time and had a lot of fun doing it. 

To help our continued improvement, we decided to cap off the month with a postmortem, discussing what went right and what went wrong. We can then take these learnings into the next month. Over time we expect the quality of our games to get better and better.

Things That Went Well

• Making a commitment to work on the game for 10 minutes, every day. - This was a commitment I made to myself at the start of this year. Setting the bar low makes it achievable and allows for discipline over motivation. Even if it's 1AM and I'm exhausted, I can still get in 10 minutes. Typically though I ended up working on things for about an hour, which is saying a lot because it's been an especially busy period of life. I highly recommend this to anyone else who wants to make disciplined progress.
  
• The one-month deadline - At some points we thought, "If only we could extend just a little more time..." but honestly a month is plenty of time. Lots of game jams are only one weekend, or 10 days. My philosophy here was that if we can't get to a great game in a month, then we don't need more time, we need to GET GOOD. Move on to the next thing. Constraints are good in this regard.
  
• Very proud of the art - almost everything together art wise, just like the original key concept art Coopal00ps made. We overcame a lot of technical art hurdles. We got the wavey ocean background, fluid, particle emitters, waving tentacles, and more. Doing the concept art up front was a great guide and inspiration for us both.
• Using Unity's wide array of tools - This was my first time using Unity's tilemap. The takeaway here is that Unity generally has a huge amount of tools, and it's likely worth the time to get to know a lot of them. I still have a lot of familiarity to build up. For example neither of us have mastery over the animation system yet. Need to get better at that.
• Partnering together - Coopal00p's superpower is polishing the heck out of everything. I (Pandamander) am really good at failing quickly, trying new ideas, and cutting stuff that isn't working. For example I added in gameplay elements like treasure chests, and a win condition, then Coopal00ps came in and polished it up. This is a great one-two punch and I'm glad we teamed up.

Things That Can Be Improved

• Playtest was too late - We didn't actually send the game to anyone else to play until we had 2 days left to ship. This was a huge mistake. They had a bunch of obvious excellent feedback that would have been useful earlier in the month. So next month we are setting a goal of doing our first playtest no later than the 15th day.
• Ending of the month was a hectic - We got most of our P0's done, and many P1's. But we had to scrap a lot of features at the end that we wouldn't have time to get to (like throwing harpoons!). The takeaway here is to be much more careful in our scoping.
• Budget more time for custom features - One takeaway was that the parts that were standard to many games (like health UI, platform movement, jumping, rain particles, etc) were very quick to implement. We'd just go look up a tutorial and build it within a night or two. But the custom features unique to our game took forever. For example the level flooding system took a long time, almost 10 days out of 28. The takeaway here is that it would be better to identify up front what parts of the game are custom, and allow for a lot of time.
• Physics and feeling takes a long time - We never really got to a good place with the platforming. The ladders don't work great, and the jumping doesn't feel like it works a lot of the time. The takeaway here is that getting good feeling movement just takes a lot of time to get right, so we should prepare for that
• Feels a bit like a tech demo, more than a fun game -  The treasure chest system was added at the last minute and helped, but we never quite got it to being a really fun game. I think this goes hand in hand with play testing earlier. Next time around we'll try to focus more on the game loop itself.

What's Next?

After launching we celebrated all the great progress we made! We now have a hopper full of game ideas that we want to tackle this year. Next up for March 2022 we are starting on a 2D game inspired by the N64 classic Wave Race 64. 

I hope someone finds this useful. Take care and stay tuned for our next game!

- Pandamander and Coopal00ps