Game Development - And the importance of publishing

In my life i've dabbled with games design a lot, everything from board games on paper, to 3d level design and I even wrote a dissertation for my university degree in Games Design all about realistic lighting effects in video games. But apart from a few small projects for university assignments I never finished any of my own creations. Always moving on to a different engine or learning a different part of games design.

That is why with RockPuncher I set my main goal on being to finish something and get it out there. Why is that so important you may ask? Because the process as a whole teaches you a lot of things.

I am writing this dev blog mostly for future me to look back on and read if I ever stray back to the never publishing development cycle, but also so others can see and learn from years of mistakes I have made.

So, what can we learn from publishing. Well first you get to see the whole process, design, coding, art creation, sound creation, problem solving, level design, testing, bug fixing, feature adding etc.

Parts of this cycle can be missed if you keep restarting every other week. How can you possibly improve or get your dream game published if all you know how to do is setup some basic movement and load in temporary (and probably badly drawn) art assets to run around in a blank room.

Some key things I learnt from completing this project, that will help me in future projects:

• Projects always take longer than you imagine, account for bug fixing and difficulties when planning
• No matter how much you test, someone else will always find a bug when playing, so get lots of people to test it if you can, of different interests, skill groups and platforms
• Testing will not only fix bugs, but let you add new features you never even thought of
• It doesn't matter if your first games suck or are not fully polished, what matters is you finish the project, complete the whole process and learn, so that you can improve for your next project

The 3rd point there I found really interesting, in my game there are bushes you can destroy by hitting them, they play a part in the puzzles. A friend of mine named Kia really liked smacking the bushes because of the fun particle system I had, so he would always destroy them before even looking at a puzzle. This left him in scenarios where he couldn't solve a puzzle because the bushes he needed were not there, and he did not reset the level because it hadn't occured to him the bushes were important in solving it, because he could no longer see them to remind him.

This lead me to create a small debris object that spawns after a bush is killed, that appears like bits of bush on the floor, to remind the player "A bush was here and might be important", giving them info they need to complete the puzzle. I lovingly nicknamed this the "Kia's Destruction Hotfix".

It is these kinds of things that I hope people learn and take away from this blog, the whole process is important because you can learn from players phyiscally PLAYING your game, what went wrong, what could be done better and what interesting new ideas you could add or keep in mind for future games.

Anyway if you read this far, thanks for reading and I hope you were atleast inspired a little bit to publish publish publish! And thank you to everyone who tested and played my game :D