Devlog #4 - Postmortem

My game Starterre reflects me as a game designer by showing off what I value most in video games. I love playing and creating games because of their ability to tell heartfelt stories and convey messages or themes by creating an immersive experience for the player. This principle is what I aimed for with Starterre. It’s ultimately a story about the inherent kindness of people and finding meaning in having a community. Even though the game ends before Loopy ever finds out the explicit truth about themself, solving the mystery is less important than the friendship they have with the townsfolk. It’s these kinds of stories that reflect me as a designer.

I learned quite a lot about my design practice from developing Starterre. In the past, even though I enjoy game design in general, I was frankly not very excited or passionate about working on the games I made for my classes. Working with RPG Maker this quarter made me realize that the main reason why I wasn’t passionate about my previous games is because the engines I used didn’t allow me to use my creative potential. Since I am not a programmer, I was always so focused on just making something that works and couldn’t focus on the actual design and art of the games. Making Starterre in an engine that doesn’t require any programming knowledge at all allowed me to be excited about the game and actually work on consistently instead of dreading each checkpoint. Even though art is the main thing that I do, I learned that I also enjoy other aspects of making games like writing and level design. Thus, my design process was to work on multiple areas of the game little by little instead of doing one single big thing and then moving on the next. What I mean is that instead of, for example, writing all the events and dialogue at once and then moving on to art, I did some events and some art at the same time. My instinct as an artist is to do all the art first, but I chose this design process instead because I felt confident using the engine and wanted to maintain my creative flow rather than burning it all at the beginning.

I’m particularly proud of the dialogue and characters in this game. Obviously, I didn’t have time to give the characters full side stories or anything, but I did my best to give them all backgrounds and personalities in their dialogue. I wanted the town residents to all seem like they could be real people with real lives, and I think I succeeded in that. Making them down-to-earth was important to me because the theme of the game is finding community, so the characters needed to be grounded and interesting.

There are several things that did not turn out as expected because of time constraints. The map is quite small, the story is quite short, there is no background music, I couldn’t add some planned bonus content, and there are only five NPCs that have significant dialogue and character portraits. However, I think the biggest thing that I wish I could have done more with is the expressions/emotions for each NPC. I added happy, sad, and surprised expressions for each one of them, but I wish I had more time to add more emotions and even more poses. I think it would have added a lot of life into the characters. The lack of background music is also a big disappointment, but I unfortunately could not find any suitable free-to-use music with the time I had left. Even more so than programming, I have absolutely no musical knowledge at all, so I can’t make it myself.

If I were to do this again, I think the biggest thing I would do differently is make a more extensive game design document. I did make and use one, but I didn’t write out every single thing in it. Using the game design document more effectively could have helped me budget my time better and I would have ended up having more time for the things I mentioned earlier, like character expressions and finding background music. For example, for each character’s dialogue, I wrote a general overview of what I wanted them to say, but didn’t write out a proper script. If I had, it would have been much easier to make edits to the dialogue before putting it in the game, and I could have saved some time. Despite my mistakes, making Starterre was a fantastic learning experience and it reignited my passion for making games.