Hi, Veronica here! This is the first postmortem I've written and it's somewhat long as I dive into how it all started, what I learned and what I would change. If you're interested, keep on reading :)

The Idea

I am the type of person that is most creative and want to do all kind of things when I'm really busy at work (My day job is as a software developer). Back in mid November I saw a game jam with the theme Love Letter (Sorry, but I don't remember the jam name -_-' ), but what really caught my attention it was the one of the possible takes on the theme it gave: A love letter to something you love! 

I started thinking what would be best and decided to do a game related to reading, also I really wanted to try and do something with pixel art. So the original idea was only reading as many books as you could within a time limit and earn money to buy them. It was a simple typing game because when I found out about this jam, it had already started and only lasted for the weekend. I really doubted I could finish it, but I really liked the theme so I told myself I would summit the game only if I made it on time. Well, in the end I got confused with the time zones and mid development I checked how much time I had left just to discover it has already ended 2 hours ago. I didn't finish the game and ended up filing this game for later. 

With the start of the new year, I wanted to try doing a game outside a jam that I could finish in a few weeks or months as I've been working on the new version of The Potionist Apprentice and this is a project that will be long in development. I wanted to try and finish a game on my own time and gain experience and the emotion of finishing a project. So I decided to try and finish one I had previously started and ended up deciding to add more functionality to my simple typing game and then publish it. 

The Development

In January, I continued with the development of The Bookworm Way of Life from where I had left it off. I already had some of the art done: character sprites, the room and the pc windows, but only the work and book buying windows. Also, I had the basic functionalities of book buying, work, time management and reading. 

At this point, I had two main problems I hadn't taken into account when I intended to finish a this game idea in a weekend: the character could only restore their energy when sleeping and I needed to actually add a reasonable amount of books that the player would be able to buy and read. 

Food Store

So that the character could restore their energy, I added a food store where I had different options that varied in how much energy and bliss they replenished as well as the price. This was easy to do as I just had to take the book shop code and do a few modifications. With this, it became more a challenge of managing your money and time to manage to read the books set as the goal.

Books

This was the task that took most of development time, almost 3 of the 4 months were spent on this. I started by selecting from books I've read which ones I thought would be fun to have in the game and wrote them into a spreadsheet that resulted in a list of over 200 books. It was way too long so I trimmed it down to 107 books. Now I had the problem that the book and author' names could not be the same as in real life, so I started the long process of trying to make up names that would relate in some way to the original ones, so that if someone knew the book, they could easily identify it. This was not really necessary, as I could have just written random names and selected a bunch of words for each book but this was a special project for me so I took this approach. Another thing that took a lot of time and maybe it was really not necessary was the descriptions of the books. Same as with the names, I had to write a book's description close enough to the real one and this was what really affected the time I spent on this aspect of the game. I say that it was not really necessary as this description only appears when the player hovers over a book in the book shop or their bookshelves. Something I doubt people even do.

Work

With both of previous problems resolved, I started searching other ways to improve the gameplay. I added a bonus multiplier when the player didn't make mistakes so that it would be easier to make money. At the same time, to balance the game, I added some bias bars that showed which type of work piece was being neglected and needed to be classified too. If the player's work was too unbalanced, they lost the multiplier. 

Reading

I made some changes on the "reading" mechanic to make it easier to type and made it so the length of typed word affected in the amount of pages read. Also, by suggestion of my brother, I added a recovery time after the player made a mistake typing. Before this, the players wouldn't notice they made a mistake, kept on typing, lose a lot of energy and die (not really, just pass out). Also added a little fade animation when the typed word changed.

Notifications

It was really easy to lose track of time or the current stats of the player, so it was easy to miss work or pass out while reading, so I added a notification system that would notify the player of this things to help them keep track.

Emails

It was really depressing to be the character of the game, as they would be alone in a room for days without interaction. To solve this, I added a email system so that the player would get mails from the character's mom and get some interaction. Then, taking advantage of this system, I added book discounts and releases mails. 

Tutorials

I knew I had to put some way for the player to know what needed to be done, so I added a simple tutorial for the mechanics I thought needed them.

Testing and Changes

By the mid March, I started some tests with other people besides my family, with the disclaimer that I hadn't yet finished adding the entirety of the books. Some days later I started getting feedback on the game and knew I had to make some changes. First I fixed all the bugs reported and then thought about possible solutions to the negative feedback I received.

Healthy Food

There was a mail that the character received from their mom, on day 5 I think, about buying food and recommended the player to eat healthy stuff... the problem was that there was not a healthy choice in the food store. Also, a common comment I received was that their energy would get depleted too fast. So I added healthy food to the possible food choices and when the character ate one of them, they would receive a healthy buff, a time when they would not get tired.

Promotions/Demotions

Another common comment I received was that there was not enough money. For this I balanced the book's and food's prices and because I wanted to add some variety to the work mechanics, I made some changes so that the player could get promoted if they had a great performance at work. With the promotions came more money won per piece and increased difficulty. Also, I added the possibility to be demoted if you were absent too much to add some balance.

Cat/Other Activity

The last important comment was that they felt they had too much free time as they would finish really quickly the released books and would need to wait for new ones to come out. I knew this would rarely occur once I finished adding all the books and the correct amount of words per book, but still I wanted to add something more to the game. 

At the start of the game, I had considered adding a cat just because if this was a game that contained what I loved, it needed cats. I had scratched that idea as I had never programmed a behavior for another character that was not the player, so I thought it would be difficult (it was not) and wanted to limit how much stuff I put in the game to finish as soon as possible. It was not until someone I know called me out for not putting a cat, even though it was supposed to be a game with my favorite things, that I considered adding a pet cat as I had already spent months on this game, what was a few days more. Well, it ended up being super easy to add this and it helped take care of dead time, even though the difficulty rose.

Saving and Loading

I didn't receive any comments on this, as this game started a web browser game. But I noticed it was really hard to finish the game in just one session, especially if the player selected more than 30 days. Also, it made it difficult for my test, so I decided to make the game a Windows executable and allowed the player to save and load their playing sessions.

Takeaways

If you've reached this part, you're a champ and I know you can bear with me a little more. So here's a little summary of what I learned from this whole process.

Great!

• Learned how to programmed behaviors for NPCs in a clean way so that the code would not be too complex or convoluted.
• Learned a lot about working with UIs as this game had a lot of them. I think this will really help me because I had trouble with this aspect in my previous games.
• Worked on some systems I know I will need in my main project, like the mails and shops.
• Learned how to make a pixel game! I was really excited for this one as I really wanted to work with another type of art besides voxel and also learn to make 2d games.
• Polished my programming skills :D

Not so great

• I did the tests with other people a bit rushed and did not know how to best organize it as this was my first time doing so.
• Did not know how to best promote my game so I just ended up releasing it a random day. This could be considered a big no no, but as it was not a commercial release, I'll just leave it here.
• The game can only be played on fullscreen and didn't add any type of settings.
• The cover and menu art could have been better.

Big NO-NOs

• Mid-development, I changed the screen reference size 3 times which resulted in me wasting time making sure the UI looked as it was supposed to.
• I added the saving system way too late in the game, so I had to spend a lot of time making sure it worked for every single thing.
• Left the music for the end and asked my brother almost at the last moment if he could help me with this (I tried to do this myself and failed... miserably). 
• As I started this project expecting it to be something small, I wasn't organized with my scripts so as it started to grow, I had to spend time organizing them so that I could continue on with the programming.

If you read it all, I really appreciate it! I know it was way too long but this helps me reflect on the process I followed and how to become better at game development. I really hope I didn't miss anything.