Happy Halloween!

Now that I've concluded major development on Halloween Scrooge, I thought it would be good to write up a more comprehensive postmortem, picking up from where I left off with the demo postmortem. Scroll to the bottom for some bonus Halloween art of the 3 ghost boys 😊

Index:

• Biggest Takeaways
• Reflection
• What’s next?

Biggest Takeaways:

I’m putting these at the top for those who don’t want to read the rest. These are the main things I learned were crucial going forward for future games:

Web Playable build is a must.

With the release of the final game, I also took the time to fix my main menu layout so I could export a web build, something I didn’t have time for in the gamejam and didn’t think was necessary. That probably hurt me. As of writing, Halloween scrooge has 276 downloads and 317 browser plays. Now, about 160 of the downloads were the demo, so the completed game has around 110 downloads. The browser plays already trump the downloads, and for a short game like this, it’s not inconvenient to play the whole thing in the browser. There’s a possibility that people were waiting for the final game so the final numbers are higher in general, and there’s also a possibility that people who played it in browser were never going to download it anyway, it’s hard to really know. I also have no way to know if people who played it in browser even finished it. But definitely for gamejam projects, I’ll be striving to upload web builds from now on.

Don’t crunch in the last couple days, promotion is just as hellish.

Because I was working right up to release, I didn’t really consider how exhausting it would be to also have to create properly sized assets for each social media site, creating a tiktok, Instagram story etc.

Make use of layering systems going forward rather than individual expression sprites.

I didn’t plan for layering in my sprites when I designed them back in September, so every expression was saved as a whole sprite. That was fine, but going forward I don’t want to do that, because I want to have blinking etc. I also want to use a better naming convention for my sprites that makes them easier to recall when I’m programming.

Compress files in a systematic way going forward.

I was getting worried about the file size towards the end of development, which didn't end up being an issue with the final game. For future games, I'd like to develop a process/system for remembering to convert/save files to smaller formats, especially image files to .webp.

Scripting out the story in advance.

I was writing as I went along, which was fine for a short project, but definitely not ideal for the longer ones.

CGs are just as important as backgrounds

I really thought I could manage to complete the CG in the same amount of time as a background, but I misjudged my perfectionist tendencies regarding how my characters look and ended up really disliking how the CG turned out. I underestimated how much time I’d need. should have assigned far more time to myself to get it done, so I could have finetuned it to my liking.

Reflection

Time for the boring part of this postmortem. It’s really hard for me to accept how much work I did on this project until I quantify it with a breakdown, and then I’m kind of… amazed I did all of this solo in 7 weeks. I'm really proud of what I accomplished in that time, so even if I feel like the game is too short, I just look at this list.

Assets

As of the Spooktobervnjam deadline (Oct 1st), the following had been completed for Halloween Scrooge's Demo:

• Writing: 3.5k of text comprising the introduction, Jak's section, meeting Endo (in total, about 30% of the final game).
• 3 original backgrounds (street, kindergarten, house interior) + 2 variations (street)
  • 1 background sketch (manor)
• Jak + Endo + Grimm main sprites
• One NPC sprite
• Custom textbox
• Game logo + promo character cards

I then took a one week break to recover from jam burnout before picking up with 3 weeks of development, culminating with release on Wednesday October 27th.

The following assets were produced in that time:

• Custom UI overhaul (history, main menu, preferences, load/save screen)
• Music and sound effects added throughout
• 2 original backgrounds (manor, carnival) + 4 variations (3 for street, 1 for house interior)
• 2 sets of costume changes for Endo
• Additional expressions for Jak, Endo and Grimm
• 5k words added to script for a total of ~8.5 in the final game:
  •  small addition to Jak's section, completed endo's section, completed Grimm's section, completed conclusion section
• Two prop sprites
• One NPC sprite
• One CG (I'm pretty unhappy with this one and would have liked it to be far more polished but time constraints were an extremely limiting factor)
• Scrolling credits screen added to post game
• Menu alignment corrected for web build
• Commissioned a main menu theme song

What’s next for Halloween Scrooge?

For now, I definitely would like to take a break and relax for a bit. I’ve been promoting Halloween Scrooge since Wednesday, and today is Halloween. I’m not really sure how many people want to play Halloween games in November hahah, so I don’t know if the stats will stay consistent (probably not). If the game gets good traction, I’m considering a sequel/follow-up as an otome/amare game with routes for each of the 3 ghosts. Even if the game doesn’t get traction, I do love the characters, so that might be my project to work on in 2022 to learn how routes work and such. I’m still thinking about it. One thing is for sure though, I'm so grateful to everyone who has played, left a comment, and even that one person who kindly donated! I'm glad this game has managed to touch some people. 

I’d like to get better at some things in the future:

• Maintaining organization when it comes to filing systems for my assets
• Learning python so I can do some fancier things with animations and gui
• Making more flexible gui
• Writing a longer game with routes (potentially a sequel to Halloween scrooge if this game gets traction)
• Marketing my work, building a following on the Hamilton Hour twitter

That’s all!

Thanks for reading (or scrolling). Here’s a little fluff comic I did of Jak, Endo and Grimm spending their day. I'll be upload any future Halloween Scrooge fluff art to the Hamilton Hour twitter, so follow there for behind the scenes, trivia, and updates on future games. Happy Halloween!