Finally Finished: Looking Back and Moving Forward.

Hello there!

After 13 months, I finally made this game. I'll admit, this was a messy project because I lost a lot of focus on what was really needed and I skimmed over a lot of things just to have this finally done and over with. 

What went wrong was as mentioned before, focus. I overstepped thinking about surprising an audience with a new update and didn't focus on the most important aspects of the game.

I won't deny, I fantasized the idea of this somehow taking off and having an audience excited for more content for it. I had ideas for a large audience who doesn't exist and I kept thinking about that exciting feeling of hyping people up for a new update instead of making the game. Going off from that, I got overly hung up on what any of the game means. I tried to make areas that relate back to the protagonist, some kind of deeper psychological meaning to Valerie and etc. I remember art was halted cause I tried to sprite out an area that I just couldn't really imagine or draw out. Realistically I needed to drop the idea regardless of how much story implications there were cause it wasn't working out at all. Looking back, in the 13 months of working on this game, 4 of those were me actually working on the game. The main collectables of the effects and the feathers didn't exist until late November (11 months into development) because of this. This is the reason why everything felt so shallow and aimless. 

This happened a lot during the spring to summer of 2021 and I think that's the reason why it took this long and is of such middling quality. Cause the main core of the game is added roughly a month or two ago with not much development. I'm sorry the game is the way it is. The reasonable thing is probably to just keep working on it but I don't want to sink more time into this project, This was supposed to release in 2021 much earlier and I want to move on to things without this weighing me down. I have other game ideas in mind and I want to get it out of the way, lessons learned. I know a bad product is still a bad product but I want to move on.

Assuming I'll make another game, I'm gonna plan things out better and remain focused on the project. Gonna hold my want for surprising people and try to let go of things easier so I don't get overly hung up on unneeded stuff. Hopefully, things will be much more focused next time. I got more RPG Maker game ideas coming up next so you'll see how much I'll follow through with that. Hopefully it won't take an entire year just to get done. This has been a lot of firsts for me so hopefully I'll make a better project next time.

Thanks for reading and playing