Fisherman's Blues Postmortem

Overview:

Fisherman's Blues took about three weeks to make. It was created in Unity 2020.3.18. The main thing about this project for me is that it was a solo project, so I did pretty much all the art, code, and music from scratch. The only thing I didn't make was the sound effects, which I got from Freesound, and the font(DK Lemon Yellow Sun from dafont).

Obviously working solo was a double edged sword; I didn't have trouble communicating with other team members, and I was able to work completely on my own schedule, which I liked because I tend to do most of my work at night, but I struggled with the sheer amount of work that had to be done. The end result = 868 lines of code and 51 individual sprites, plus about 2 minutes of instrumental music. Overall I'm satisfied with the amount of work I did on my own in a relatively short time frame. 

What Went Right:

Fisherman's Blues is a very atmospheric game and I had several people tell me that they thought the art, sound, and mechanics of the game meshed together well. I was especially happy to hear about this in regards to the music, because it was my first time composing music at all. Besides music, I did a lot of things for the first time, such as making my own custom particle sheets(bubbles in the crab minigame and behind the boat in the sailing minigame) and also just animating the crabs in the crab minigame(I have trouble with normal human walk cycles sometimes, so doing the crab was difficult. Also, I've never drawn a crab before. ). I also was proud of getting the boat to follow the cursor, which is simple but also something I've never done before. 

Related to this, I feel like I also did a good job troubleshooting my own problems. There weren't really any glaring issues I was never able to figure out overall. One issue I had was that at the dock, the water animation was being stretched, but after googling I found out it was because my sprite sheet for the water, which placed 5 long sprites side by side, was over the Unity max pixel limit for sprites of 10000 px and was thus being compressed automatically, and this was a pretty easy fix. The entire process was pretty smooth, mostly due to how simple the gameplay is. I'm also happy with how I worked as a person; I think I did a lot of work for three weeks, most of which I was in school during.  I also think I managed to control my scope pretty well--while there are some things I wanted to put in initially that didn't make it in, the game doesn't seem completely unfinished.

What Went Wrong:

I did have a little trouble with the scope and therefore the dynamite and the bone harpoon are non-functional in the final project. I also wasn't able to take player feedback as much as I wanted to.  Someone suggested adding a sort of event when the player fishes(such as having to pull up the rod when it bobs in the water, which many fishing games do) rather than having it automatically catch the fish, and this was actually what I had planned to do when I first came up with the idea for the game and never did. Another big suggestion I saw a couple times was adding an inventory system so the player can see what fish they have caught. Unfortunately that was beyond my coding ability at the time, and adding one would have meant rewriting a lot of the code to accommodate it.  I wish I considered it seriously when originally writing my code, because I think by the end of the project I had learned enough to be able to! I do agree that an inventory system would be a great addition, and I wonder if maybe I should have prioritized these things over polishing the game, which I spent most of my time on in the final week of development.  Here is the unused/unfinished inventory mockup art, which I still like, especially the fish in the first slot.

Lastly, there's a pretty big bug with the boat in the sailing minigame where after the player hits a rock and dies, they can still move around and collect fish, even with the popup. I have fixed this and will release a new web build soon, but overall it's because the sailing minigame was the last thing made and was very rushed. There are also several other things I wanted to add as polish, but I don't consider this something that went wrong; I just think there's only so much I could have gotten done in three weeks as a solo developer(also keeping in mind that this is supposed to be a prototype!).

Conclusion:

Despite its flaws, I'm happy with the overall result of the game. Although it's simple, making something like this gave me a lot of faith in myself and my skills, and I think it prepared me for any future games I make. It also gave me a lot of perspective into game development; besides the actual coding aspect, I did a ton of research when deciding the aesthetic and mechanics of Fisherman's Blues, looking to other games or minigames for inspiration. Even if this project had flopped, I put enough time and effort into it that the experience doesn't feel like a waste.