COSMOS Tower Postmortem

Hey everyone. I’ve never really done an actual post-mortem before so let’s just skip this awkwardness and get to the meat of things.

First, I just want to say thank you to everyone who’s played the game. I deeply appreciate how many of you have taken the time out of your day to give my game a chance, and I’m also really thankful of how positive the reception has been.

How Lucky I am it’s good

In all honesty, I was not expecting the game to be solid the whole way through. The last level was never tested, except to make sure everything worked properly, so I had no way of knowing whether it was likely people could figure it out. All the revisions I made to it were based on assumptions from results I got playtesting previous levels. It’s never guaranteed that you can make a game enjoyable, but under these circumstances it was even more up in the air. I’m glad to see that in the end it was playable and people enjoyed it.

Ending

Similarly, since the last level was never tested, I couldn’t get a clear idea of what people thought of the story. This made me especially nervous considering the state of the ending, which I will talk more about later. For me, the story is the most important part of a game. In fact, to tell stories is the reason I make games, so above all, I wanted the story to land. From what people have told me, I think they enjoyed it decently, but it is far rougher around the edges then I would like. What’s in the game is essentially a rough draft that I was never able to revise because I simply had to go with what I already had in order to ensure the game reached a standard of quality. While part of this time constraint was due to the fact this is a game jam game, it’s good to know about this issue, as in the future I wish to have much more refined stories, and integrate the gameplay into the story more smoothly and consistently.

One part of the story I especially wish I had more time to flesh out the ending. While I was glad to have a finished story, the fact that you get the good ending by jumping off a building has troubling implications about suicide that I did not intend. I was aware of this possibility during development, but chose to ignore it in favor of refining the puzzle design. The intention of the ending was that the player would have to take a leap of faith, but seeing as most people who’ve commented on the ending brought up the suicide implication, I see that I did not make it clear enough that that isn’t the point of the story. I feel like maybe it wouldn’t have been so noticeable if I hadn’t brought up people committing suicide by jumping off the tower in the actual game, but by not addressing the difference between the intended meaning at all, I feel like that would make the suicide implication seem more intentional, which it is not. In future games I need to focus more on making important themes and symbols come across clearer so I can write a more compelling story and don’t accidentally advocate something bad.

Coming up with story during prototype

However, one part of the story that ended up really well and had a very good creative process for was the basic premise: that you are in a tower in a universe of nothing. As I’ve said before, I wanted to focus on the story while making this game, so before I had decided on the gameplay beyond the basic concept, I was drafting the plot. The initial idea was the obvious one, something to do with a heist. Of course, something that simple is not the kind of story I wanted to tell. So, my first plan was to do a story where you enter and explore a bunker city after an apocalyptic cataclysm. But when I started prototyping, my plans changed. The initial prototype was made to test mechanics and puzzle gimmicks, and one of my ideas was to use the story as a way of ordering clues. I didn’t want to spoil the final story in the prototype, so I decided to come up with something simple, that would work with what the prototype contained. The idea that came to me was that since outside the gameplay space there was nothing, the prototype story was that the universe was full of nothing. Ultimately, I liked that story better than the  previous one because it felt more unique and because it had less risk for scope creep.

The best thing about the premise, though, was that I came up with it mid production. I have little experience with balancing the creation of the narrative and the gameplay/game design simultaneously, and as I intend to work either solo or on a very small team, getting a taste of how it works was good experience. I do, however, feel like I still need a lot more experience, as working on a game jam is not ordinary circumstances, and I’d like to be able to see how other developers balance game design and story over longer projects.

Need for more reliable playtesting method

The biggest thing I’d like to improve with my development cycle is access to and reliability of playtesting.  While making COSMOS Tower, I only had two people who would reliably test my game. And while for the sake of a game this small, two is close to enough, one was reluctant to test and the other I couldn’t watch play. I was hoping that extra feedback from the demo and private builds I sent to friends would fill in the gaps, but outside my main 2, barely anybody played, especially later builds. For larger projects I will need to find more ways to reliably recruit playtesters.

Polish

A smaller issue about production that still bothers me is the game’s lack of polish. It’s fine for a game jam game, but I really want to have my games feel more professional. For one thing, I’d like to figure out how to get pixel perfect image alignment. I tried to with Pixel Perfect camera but it kept stuttering, and I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work in a day, so I shelved it. More importantly, I’d like there to be game sounds outside the music. I don’t have experience with sound design, but I do know that with just music the game world feels empty.

Exhausting Schedule

While production mostly went smoothly outside the aforementioned issues, it ended up being very draining. I was not crunching, except for on the last day when I had to both add finishing touches and release the game, but I was also not used to working on one thing for so much for so long. I worked on this between 4-8 hours a day, excluding weekends, and about halfway through I was really looking forward to being done with it. It was worth it to finish the game, but I hope in the future I can either acclimate better to working conditions and/or give myself more agreeable ones. Probably the former, as I have yet to have a job, and so working long periods is a skill I need to grow.

Also, I should take better care of my mental health. I had a couple serious anxiety attacks during production, for reasons unrelated to the game, and it made me unable to work for a few days.

Gap between release and continuation

One of my goals with this game was to make it be a solid start to my digital career. I was hoping to release on my socials so people could see them on their own, ending it all with a livestreamed Q&A Devs’ Play. However, immediately after the jam, I was on vacation for about a month, and between just wanting to enjoy the moment and not having a chance to try out some of the other games from the jam, I never got to doing it. On top of that, I wanted to announce some new projects, but as I never posted any of the assets, I never got around to doing that either.

As of writing this, I am thinking of once again drip-feeding the music and art assets from the game, and they may already be viewable by the time this goes out on my DeviantArt and YouTube.

Still, I regret losing the momentum I gained by making this game, and I hope that this blog will help me reclaim it.

Going forward

As for the future, well, I’m continuing this blog for one thing. But also, I am currently working on some really small RPG Maker projects so I can learn aspects focused on JRPG design. It is my favorite genre, and I would love to make a few of my own, but building a whole one from scratch is just too daunting for me.

I also hope to participate in more game jams in the future, though I probably won’t do any future iterations of the jam I did this time, as I’m bothered by some of the content that was made for it, and I’d rather participate in jams that have rules against that sort of thing so that I can play more of the other people’s games without worrying.

Anyway, I’m very happy to have made a game on my own initiative, and I’m happy to have learned so much in its production. Thank you very much if you have played Cosmos Tower, I hope it made you smile, and I hope that I can make something that will make you smile again in the future.