Previous Post:
Well, the project is finished! While it’s certainly not the prettiest or most polished, I never intended it to be releasable as an actual game. It was meant to be the Unreal project I have on my portfolio so I can actually backup my claims of knowing the engine. I’ll do a little bit of number balancing before completely shelving it, but I managed to fix a lot of the bugs that was plaguing the previous version.
To address the obvious, this isn’t a pretty project. There’s still temporary art and the UI never got any major iteration. It was especially hard for me to leave certain aspects of this project unpolished. I normally like to completely polish a project to a level where it could be released, but I had too much other stuff going on with me graduating and all that. Regardless, I’m happy with what I accomplished with the project! Here’s a playthrough!
The project has its own page as well, which you can view here!
Brief Postmortem:
What went well?
There was a lot that went well honestly. I was teaching myself Unreal’s blueprinting and technical aspects, and I feel more or less used to them now. At least enough to apply for Unreal based jobs and confidently put it on my resume. The gameplay itself is fun and what I envisioned, and there’s enough art and feedback in it to give a basic understanding of what’s going on. I didn’t have too many bugs, and my pipeline for creating new food types was streamlined from the start, turning something I thought would take days into a hour long task.
I also am proud of myself for more or less keeping up with blog posts about the project. Spring break and the corona shutdowns meant I was pretty messed up for a few weeks, but I was able to sum up everything from the missing weeks pretty well.
What could have gone better?
The biggest thing I can think of is that I wanted more art and feedback. The art in the game that I made is very basic, and the icons have watermarks on them since I was using the free version of the icons. I also wish I had more time to add a proper tutorial screen, even if it’s just a VDD. I don’t like how it’s just a giant wall of text. I also wish I added a day counter that the player could see. I realized after I submitted that there isn’t anything to tell you what day it is. There are a bunch of ideas that I have, and they’re all fairly easy to implement, so I might work on it after I graduate.
