The Biggest Day of a Dev’s Life

I know I should have published this post two days ago, but you know… it’s Christmas.

Anyway, I can finally say that it is finished. I finished the development of my first videogame. It is not the highest piece of art, but allow me to be a little proud of myself that I actually had the determination to follow this through, instead of abandoning it like many other small projects. As I have talked about it in my previous post, it is not easy to build a videogame or even a mod for a game. I failed to do it several times already, I have just lost any kind of enthusiasm in less than a week.

This is why I’m glad that A Long Road Home is finished. I proved to myself that I can actually finish a project like this. And the best thing about this is not even the game itself, but the experience I gained about development in the last year. About managing my time, knowing my strengths and weaknesses regarding the development process, figuring out the best and worst aspects of making a game. (Note to self: always plan out the whole story of an adventure game before making the levels.) I’m sure I will benefit a lot from the lessons learned, and I can improve my design in my next project.

Courtesy of GamaSutra

But for know, I just want to take some time off from development. The last few months were pretty tight, I think the professional term for this is “crunch time”. I wanted to finish the game this year and release the game before Christmas, so I needed to spend a lot of time working on the project, while doing my full-time job and managing real life stuff. It was especially hard in the last few weeks, which was all about playtesting the game. Let me tell you, playing a linear adventure game over and over again almost makes you hate your own project. This was actually one of the biggest lessons learned, I will definitely use more external testers during my next project. It will take off a huge chunk of the workload off my shoulders, and I will get more feedback from these testers.

Anyway, I would like to thank everyone the advises, the support and any kind of feedback I got during the development. I hope you will find the game enjoyable. If anyone wants to check out A Long Road Home, just follow any of these widgets. The Steam and itch.io one even has a demo, no strings attached. 🙂