Because once the game’s out, you will invariably be asked to add more options. Your menus need to be robust, expandable, and *understandable* (to you, the developer). Menus aren’t just that in-between fluff before you get to the good stuff. Here are some of the lessons I’ve accumulated from this game’s development. Perhaps the most valuable thing we gained from all this is experience. As long as we don’t expand the team, and we don’t take another monster six-year dev cycle like what Phoenotopia took, we can continue. The game has at least earned enough for us to continue our modest operations. At some point in the past few months, I finished processing (or grieving) and it’s time to move on. Maybe there’s hope in the game’s long tail. As you may have heard down the grapevine, the game couldn’t be what you call successful. I think the worst of it is over… I’ll still be around to do the last updates and bug fixes, but I’m ultimately ready for what’s next. For some, the game couldn’t play at all (really glad Steam allows refunds). A few times, due to disorganization, I unwittingly rolled back a fix that was meant to be applied. There were a few times where in fixing something at one party’s behest, it introduced problems for another party. There was a troublesome stutter that some players were sensitive to that my whole team didn’t notice since our eyes compensated it away. The game needed to be able to handle multiple control schemes, screen resolutions, refresh rates, and more! I had a 60Hz monitor going into launch and didn’t know anything about Hz (I do now). Unlike Switch’s one configuration, the PC has multiple configurations and factors to account for. This is our first commercial PC launch, so it was a real baptism by fire. The game launched on Steam last month, and like any launch, it was hectic. At some point, you put the paintbrush down and say it’s done. But I’m not going to be making any more major changes to the game. I’ll still be doing bug fixes and maintenance on the PC and Switch versions, and playstation and xbox ports are underway (by a publisher). The purpose of this blog was to be a “development” blog for Phoenotopia, and well, Phoenotopia’s development is done. I debated how to open this blog post, but perhaps the main crux of this blog post is the best place to start.
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