Post mortem for Cloudy 

It's been over three months since cloudy was officially released and completed. We are gonna provide our final thoughts on what we learned and what we would change. Thank you to all our friends for their support and for playing the game 

David 

 What did you learn?

I am sure to anyone who has plaid cloudy the main influences are obvious what our inspiration for the project was Pokemon and Star dew valley of course

Fallout for our quest system 

Overall the goal was to make an RPG, having the player name the character would have been a nice and easy touch, but overall I think we succeeded. The NPCs giving items added some complexity but was worth it in showing the community aspect and is a lot like how pokemon works. Game design wise I really got to flex my muscles. Getting good testers was really important and we had a list of people who were willing to play enough and show us what they liked and didn't like. I definitely see how much energy it takes to make something of high quality, tons of team communication and focus. Art wise I got to flex my muscles quite a bit but I rushed a lot of the sprites, didn’t do a great job of looking into consistent angles, but the size and pallet is mostly consistent. 

I did a lot more design for the programming than I was initially comfortable with, allowing Zoda to do a lot of the implementation. I will admit as a programmer that was rough to deal with cause I really see myself as more of an implementer. I did get to mess around with the logic in our sound system which I later used in a unity project so that was neat. Getting to work through how we should do it and seeing if that works was also really cool. I want to be a software architect so it was good practice in that area. I added a good amount of vegetables but a lot of the code for the internal logic was Zoda. As for the sounds I made, honestly I am really proud of them. The chime is really sweet and simple. I think I made one or two other ones. I feel I still have a lot to learn in this area as well.

What would you have done differently ?

Spent way more time on every sprite, looked for an artist mentor to give me honest feedback/advice, considered angles more.

I think a level designing tool would have added a lot more, doing save and load to start would not have hurt either and now that we know what we need it will be a breeze.

What is one thing that you would want to add to the game? 

 Tons more areas, a bargaining system to buy less, more beds, much much more quests

Christan (Zoda)

Learned: 

1. some pixel art stuff

2. how to make an inventory system

3. how to make a dialogue system

4. how to make a quest system

5. it take about a month to make a game that's worth money

6. a tile creation system that I enjoy using

Different:

1. made a class for buttons

2. made a layered system (aka a 3d array) instead of making the tiles keep track of it

3. set aside more time for testing, both getting testers and testing the game myself

Add:

1. better robot commands

2. Crops that were special to each area