Biweekly Games - Game 3 Postmortem

I'm doing a challenge to develop and release a small game every two weeks. You can read more about it in my first game postmortem here. This is getting kind of complicated to maintain on an every 2 weeks basis, because of doing this while working and attending university, which are both very time demanding. Specially this last month which I had internet issues, a broken cellphone and an illness. Maybe I'll do one game a month, but developed in a 2 week timeframe. We'll see.

Idea

The theme I polled for this game was "Assemble". This one I spent about 10 minutes thinking until my mind defaulted to Tetris blocks. I am kind of in a Tetris kick these days so why not make something inspired by it. I had this vision of a game where you would join small pieces together and form this bigger construct, which would endure a wave of obstacles, and I thought it would be a good enough idea to pursue, so I started making it into this game.

What Went Right

Programming this game was pretty fun, albeit complicated. There were many edge cases for the piece placements, and figuring them out and how to deal with them was a fun process. Also the rotation and undoing of placements were both complicated things to implement, but I managed to make a cool small command pattern implementation for queuing actions and performing them in reverse order whenever you undo something, so I was happy with that.

What Went Wrong

Almost everything else. I don't really like how the game turned out, I think the design is pretty flawed and I didn't have the time or energy to make interesting puzzles beyond the few that are in the build. The art was done in a single day so it's all not really polished. The game also has a lot of small bugs that I didn't have time to fix.

I think this might have been a better game if I had iterated more on it's initial design before I started implementing it, which is something I'm not good at yet. For example, I think the "incoming obstacles" visualization is bad, and the horizontal perspective of the game doesn't favor knowing which obstacles are coming your way. Maybe if the obstacles fell down (again, like Tetris) it would be a better choice. Also the way I did it, the obstacles can easily be surpassed by stacking pieces to overcome all obstacles by height, which was not what I intended for the game to be.

It also was very hard to describe this game in the few tutorial words that I had in the build, and I didn't have time to make something more instructive.

What I Learned

That having fun making a game doesn't really mean it translates into a fun thing to play, and that simple puzzle games are deceptively complicated to conceive.