Introduction

After receiving feedback and critiques about my game, I have decided to create a short postmortem to help highlight some of the successes and failures of my game, to help learn from my mistakes, and to hopefully help you to learn something from it.

Background

MAYO RIOT is a prototype for a story based top-down shooter, made for the Pirate Software Game Jam 14. Approximately 50 hours were spent working on the game, in my free between work and school.

The theme was "its spreading", and obviously what better to spread than shooting mayo out of a gun! (Big thanks to my brother for the idea of making a game about mayo) The story and mechanics were inspired by Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, Splatoon, and Knuckle Sandwich. The story is intended to be silly and light, but with deep gunplay mechanics.

TLDR

• What didn't go well:
  • Not enough time/inefficiency (due to work and school)
  • Focusing on story too much
  • Not having enough creative mechanics and starting gameplay development late
  • Not focusing on the theme enough
  • No prerelease playtesting

• What went well:
  • Quality art for the time spent
  • Sound design and Music
  • cohesive style and game feel
  • GDD and checklist kept important things in focus

What didn't go well?

• Controllable factors
  • Originally started by working on the story, which went through many versions and edits. I focused too much on the story, such that most of the story ideas never even made it into the game. I could have improved this by adding more story mechanics in game, such as collectable lore items, NPCs and dialogue for the player, NPCs and enemies/final boss. 
  • Having started with the story, mechanics were secondary in priority. This caused the gunplay to be basic, even if polished. One way to improve this would have been to focus more on mechanics, especially relating to the theme.  Doing so would also help for the success of the jam, as currently it is very vaguely connected to the theme.
  • One of the worst problems was that the theme was not well developed in my game, as the mayo spreading mechanic had little use.  A fix would be to add enemies that interacted with mayo, such as enemies \ slowed by mayo. Enemy variety could help as well, such as an enemy that removed mayo or shot corrupt mayo.
  • Lastly, playtesting was very limited before the jam ended, which allowed very basic problems to be present in the final game. Simple errors such as enemies hiding behind buildings, navigation being unclear, and text readability, could have easily been fixed with having quick playtests throughout the development process.
• Uncontrollable factors
  • Due to work and school, free time was limited for working on the game, and caused my sleep schedule to be disturbed which took a toll on my productivity. (although overall the game jam has boosted my productivity more that hurt it)

What went well?

• Art and Music being my strongest skills, they were the most successful part of the game.
• The quality and speed of creating assets was some of the highest I've ever had, especially for the game page, cover art, and marketing. Having already created two games with pixel art, my skills and efficiency has increased to a high enough level that quickly prototyping art is quick and easy.
• Having been composing music for 3+ years, my music has been the highlight of my games, and I am proud of the soundtrack I've created for this project. Especially for the boss theme, the music fits the art and vibe of the game very well in my opinion.
• Sound design is one my newest skills that I have learned, but for this project the sounds were successfully implemented to help improve the immersion and game feel.
• continuing on game feel, implementing particles and camera shake elevated the game feel and juice of the game, which was one of the best parts according to the feedback I have received.
• The requirement of the jam to have a GDD (Game design document) I first thought was just an annoying extra thing to do but really improved my planning and efficiency by many factors.
• Having a place to write down everything from story to gameplay mechanics was highly beneficial, as well as having a checklist.
• To have a checklist for things to do, and optional things to add if extra time was available, was really helpful to keep on track, and to know what to start on when I sit down to work.