Postmortem: Let’s Dig

There is almost nothing in this game and yet, it took me days for me to consider it “finished”

Check out the itch.io page for the game.

This is my second “completed game” that i am calling done, this does not mean that the game was completed, this does not mean that the game is even beatable, this just means that i am done with it, and i am not messing around with it anymore.

The game was supposed to be released on the Godot Wild Jam 2 and the theme was “Hidden Within”. I decided to enter this jam to make a game with my brother, instead i am releasing a unfinished version of the game more than a month later.

I made a lot of mistakes while making it and i want to share it with the world and myself so we can learn from them.

The Idea

Me and my brother discussed and we got the idea to make a game around the digging mechanic from the Trickster Online, you dig by clicking on different spots of the map and you get a item when you are done. So i started the prototype really fast and then i though that it wasn’t fun enough for the main game loop, so i decided to add a minigame to it, and that was a big mistake.

The Development Process

The final version of the drilling mechanic

Now, instead of doing one game, i was actually working on two games that had to be integrated between them, and i did not have any previous experience doing it. Then the release date of the game jam flew by and i had not finished this new prototype of idea. So i decided to keep working on it, my wife challenged me to finish this game before working on another project.

Some time had passed since the jam ended and i kept working on it, finished the integration between the minigame and the game, but i still had to do a dialogue system to the game so i could make it a true adventure, now the list of features to it kept growing and i still had no idea of what i was going for with this.

I got overwhelmed by the scope of the project, so i kept procrastinating to get back on this project, and by brute forcing my way, i finished the dialog system, but the minigame wasn’t actually any fun (it couldn’t even be closed). So i reworked the minigame, made a teleporting system and a level loading system. Now that all of those features are done, i don’t know what levels to do next, what history i want to make, and that’s why i want to call this project done.

The game seen on the editor

What I Learned From his

Next time that i start on a project i will try to focus on mechanics first, just like Arcade games did on the past. Trying to integrate differents parts of a system into a RPG like scheme for no reason is actually bad for the game as a whole. I will try to delegate more things to other people on the team and try to move faster on the FUN aspects of the game.

You should not underestimate the simple things of a project, they add up pretty fast, this article by itself has more content than the game, but it took almost no time to make compared to the game.

I hope you liked this, i encourage you to download the source and see it on the Godot Engine, if you want to see how i overengeneered this game to no end.

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