Tech Demo 1 + Postmortem

So came this day when I release something :) Here you got link to tech demo:

Little Big Adventure : Remake - Tech Demo 1

Now that this is behind I think it the best to right away summarize what went right and what not so much :)   

Postmortem 

When last weekend was starting I didn't even thought about releasing anything soon. It was just another weekend like every other. But well ... one thing to another and I ended with announcement : I will release small tech demo.

Whole idea behind Tech Demo 1 is: you get what you seen. In this small demo there is no hiding of issues that game right now have, there is also almost no hacking stuff. This past week I was mostly improving UI and preparing whole build. This of course may dissatisfy you especially after MonsieurKakis released his fully playable game but well I cannot do too much about this.

In a 1-3 month I will release Tech Demo 2. This should show you how game improving and what direction I want to take it.

What went right

From the begin you guys were awesome thanks for all the comments thanks to them whole process was really fun experience. 

Game just worked

It just worked how I wanted. Last changes stabilized a lot of weird behaviors and I could just focus on other things.

Tools also worked

Whole map you see was assembly in week with creating all of white boxes and configuring level so grass was looking nice.

New UI system

Simplifying it and making it way how it work right now was good decision. I could quickly iterate over whole UI and create some nice results.  When I will add editor this should be really cool tool

Resource system

If not new resource system I would spend ages assembling build. Now it was just quick iteration over it with small issues with this few stuff that are still not part of it.

NSIS 

Choosing it as installer was great idea. In 2 hours I had whole thing done.

What went wrong

Last moment changes

There were few of this that wasn't tested too well. This resulted in time spend for debugging some base things not improving tech demo.

Building player experience from scratch

I have game but still didn't spend too much time on : 

• Intuitive menus, 
• UI flow, 
• Transitions between game states, 
• Adapting of UI depending if you use Keyboard & Mouse or Gamepad. 

Most things you see in game was created this week.

I failed to deliver Graphics Options from menu

This is my big regret for UI that is why it is separate point.

Missing UI editor 

After this release this task gained a lot higher priority.

Game is tested only in debug environment

This created some issues and because of preparing I found some big issue with flow in my animation system. It's working right now thanks to only Hack I done this week. Now will be time to do it properly.

Keyboard & Mouse support

I need to spend more time on this. Right now there missing customization of controls and mouse support in menus. Generally I will need to spend more time looking into that and trying to improving all issues I know about. So don't wory I'm thinking about users of Mouse & Keyboard just to make stuff that will satisfy you it will take a lot more work than Gamepad users.

Summary

So generally for one week work I think that whole release went really well. I learned more about weaknesses and strength of my technology. I now see few new places to improve and because this was really nice experience I decided that I will be trying to release new tech demo each 1-3 months. This should allow me to create more stable release pipeline and improve game :)

For you it's mean that you will be able to see mechanic of game in action :D for game itself you will need to wait a little bit longer and satisfy with Video Previews :)

Greg