(I'm not a writer but I've always wanted to do one of these)

As a first full game, I think it actually turned out pretty good. 

At first, I just wanted to create a landscape. I feel like the majority of my games stem from me just wanting to try and mess around with something I haven't used before. The landscape was pretty lame once I figured out how it worked. Not the tool but the actual thing I created. Just an empty nothing, but in its nothingness comes possibility. I created a player character to explore the area and it reminded me of an empty desert. That's when the first form of the idea arose - Heat mechanics, day and night cycle, and that was fun! Developing more I did the scavenging mechanics and upgrades. I originally didn't want to have any enemies at all, but I felt like the night time was too boring. 

Adding the enemies was a whole thing, I wasn't confident in any decisions I was making about them. Should the player have a way to combat the enemies? Should they hunt the player down or just be territorial? Empower the player or make them feel vulnerable? It's the nature of all game design. I just started making choices, almost randomly. Then I'd play it, test it, figure out what worked and what didn't. 

So at this point there is day mechanics, night mechanics, but no real goal or anything for the player to work toward. I had the idea that the player would be gather the resources for their vault as well as finding their friend that went missing. This actually made the game really work. The isolation of the world and mechanics, combined with the story of the missing friend, It all really worked! 

After playtesting it I really struggled with people being bored with the day time. I tried to combat this by adding even more collectibles, and permanent upgrades that persist after you die. After these changes I stopped getting complaints about the day time so I feel like it fixed it pretty successfully. 

I did have a pretty funny playtest where the player found a spot on a mountain that they could scale and evade all the enemies for the entirety of the night, essentially breaking the entire core loop of the game. The reason I found it so funny is because it was like the 30th playtest and no one tried to scale the mountain until that point. 

My biggest flaw not only with this game, but also with me in general, is confidence. I should just have confidence in my choices. I wasn't confident enough to start marketing early and that's really where the issue lies. I think if people actually played the game they would like it. But since I didn't do any real marketing, there was no audience when I released the game. 

But ultimately, it is what it is. I just have to learn from my mistakes and move forward. I'm wanting to make enough money to be able to go to game design school. 

I have fun making games and I want to do it for the rest of my life. 

I hope you enjoyed this postmortem. 

-Phil