Long ago, after participating in the 2017 LewdJam, some friends and I, after seeing the reaction to our submission, decided to continue developing the game. In the course of a month and a half we managed to make great advances and even deliver some new version demos on my patreon but ultimately the game was abandoned. This is an exploration of that process and ultimately what caused its demise.

How it began

After the LewdJam submission and seeing the reaction of some of the comments, I decided to remake the game, after all what was submitted could be considered basically a prototype and things like graphics and gameplay could be improved. Soon after with ten63 we started to find more people to help in the project, specially a programmer since I was not really good at it and my talents could be better spended on graphics, art and finally managing the project.

And managing is what I mostly did, especially doing documents and managing task tools to keep the project on course in addition to making the art. Nothing out of the ordinary for a small team, and all this work was giving us quick results. So much so that we managed to deliver a few demos on my patreon. So much that we also started to do some additional features. (nothing really crazy though).  

So everything was going well right, But then why did we just stop working on it?

What went wrong then?

To begin with, managing time, weird. I know since we were working at a good pace, but in retrospect speed is not everything, maybe for big companies that look for efficiency and quick results, but maybe not so much for an indie game dev team that their work is more akin to a small shop. Managing tools have that caveat: Seeing constant deadlines and schedules forces you to crunch, and deliver fast, something that can burn you out, and sure we did. 

But then why we went so fast, surely we could slow the pace. Well at the time I was Aiming to finish the project as fast as possible, especially since I decided to stop all my other activities. In the course of a month sure we progressed a lot, but new challenges appeared, new features I did not account for needed to be developed. Unfortunately Game dev is like that, you never know what else you might need and all of that means more time, time I did not have back then.

But finally, even if that was the case, after doing so much progress, why not continue and deliver a finished product. Probably the most important fact: the game was not fun, at least not for me. 

A problem of rushing is not being able to sit and evaluate your progress, in addition we were set on the LewdJam original concept, but it really had gameplay issues that comes from the very game design core: Confusing rules, weird controls, annoying gameplay disruptions. All coming from my hubris and desire to do something different. Weird approach considering I was told before I should aim for small improvements and changes, specially if it is your first project, bigger things can come after achieving some experience.

In short what caused the project abandonment was a combination of bad time management, bad gameplay design and burnout.

But then why this post-mortem?

As usual, not everything was bad. A lot of the pixel-art, artwork and general setting ideas are solid, and you always will learn new things from failing, especially things to consider for future projects. 

For sure my main reason to do this one is to reflect on my previous game development endeavors and try once again after so many years. Even when I never finished a proper game, the people’s reaction to my previous ones is encouraging. Now that I'm wiser (I hope)have finished some other projects and feel even more comfortable with my art, I really want to try again, now with tools better suited for me. Hopefully things will go better this time.

Well additionally I will leave the Last version we made for patreon, you will find it has lots of improvements, but still is plagued with many bugs XD, nothing I can do to fix them, but still just in case you are curious.