Postmortem

As a game, Fading Light is set in a post-apocalyptic, semi-steampunk world where you play as the tiny pilot light for a machine that broke down due to disuse. You were thrown clear of the final explosion that destroyed your machine and your task is to make your way back down through the ruins, collecting whatever spare parts and fuel you can find along the way, before your light goes out. Barring your path are the lights of other machines, long destroyed, hungering to add your flame to theirs. Avoid them, collect your tools, and repair your home.

Things That Went Wrong

1. Time Management: Attempting to make this game by assignment deadlines while taking other classes AND while working a full-time job was a challenge. I’m gonna work on setting up a bit more structure when I start a programming project in the future
2. Level Design: This is a weird one, because I craft my own Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, so I don’t know why designing levels for this game was so difficult for me. I think I might need to play more similar games to get a feel for how other game levels are designed. I also made a few mistakes, like accidentally putting the walls and floors on the same layer and having to go back and erase all my walls so that I could recreate them on a different layer, which was exceedingly frustrating.
3. Art: I tried. I really did. Everything I was able to create on my own using Pixel Studio was complete trash (in my opinion). I just wasn’t able to create the vibe that I was looking for in this game. I ended up finding some wonderful art assets on itch.io that I could use though, and actually ultimately inspired this final idea.
4. Programming: Oie. I do not have the baseline of experience required to make a game from scratch. Admittedly the more tutorials I followed, the more things started to make sense, but if I was trying to mesh two ideas from two different instructors their codes weren’t likely to fit together smoothly without some tinkering. That was the problem though, I didn’t know HOW to tinker, and I still don’t. But experience will come with time.
5. Game Design: This was not actually the kind of game I am looking to make and honestly that kind of colored my motivation throughout the whole process, but I knew that my original idea was currently out of my wheelhouse, so I kept telling myself that this was a steppingstone to learning the skills I needed.

Things That Went Right

1. Animation: Animating sprites was probably the most fun I had in this whole process, and I truly enjoyed doing it. There’s just something about running the program and seeing your sprites start moving that really gasses you up. I would love to take a class on pixel art to be able to create my own sprites from scratch.
2. Audio/Music: Selecting music for this project was fun because I got to listen to a bunch of samples from different artists who fit the vibe of what I was looking for but I also heard a LOT that didn’t but that I still wanted to use in the future, so I bookmarked them for later use.
3. Playtesting Feedback: I loved this step because even though a lot of the ideas were out of my wheelhouse, I definitely made note of them to figure out later because they were all SO GOOD and I wanted to do everything suggested!
4. Scene/Asset Organization: I don’t think I ever once lost track of an asset or object in a scene. Someone had recommended to me that I neaten things up near the beginning of the project, make use of empty objects as folders or grouping scripts by what they were for, and everything was neat and organized the whole time.
5. Unity: I really enjoyed using Unity as a game engine as a noob programmer. The engine has a lot of readily available tools to make your life easier and to do a LOT of the grunt work for you. There are also hundreds of thousands of tutorials to do various things with the game engine online, so you’re never lacking for help with it. It wasn’t without its challenges, but I look forward to using it for many more projects in the future.