Postmortem devlog

Successes

• The illustration and character design are very successful, especially for my target audience, who are Chinese teenage girls. According to players, the characters are trendy and cute. They do a great job creating the seemingly childish and light-hearted vibe.
• Sound design
  • The background music does help build the game world and keep players engaged with the game.
  • The sound effects (Mannas hitting the petri dish, button click sounds and etc) add rich sensational details to the experience and do improve usability.

• It is (relatively) easy to get started because the game has a simple action loop: check task - change config - wait for the result. The game encapsulates a complicated system well enough that players can hardly realise the heavy backend parts.

Failures

1. The game has no full game loop or viable solution to win. It becomes more like an experiment or exploration than a player-centred strategy game. I was too ambitious when making my production plan: the current product is only 40% done compared to what I originally planned, which can be roughly described as a smaller and simpler Plague inc. When I started to test the numeric balancing, I realised that it may require some mathematical knowledge that remains unknown to me to make a solvable strategy game.

2. The game UI was made from scratch - it was very time-consuming but the result is not satisfying. To simplify the code to a minimum, I used a lot of Transfrom.translate and SetActive. These primitive solutions make the UI elements appear or disappear abruptly and sometimes cause usability issues or disrupt player's strategy.

Lessons Learned

1. I have made several versions of the soundscape. The first few versions were repeating and not really match the art style: if the music sounds repeating, players will soon get fed up with it. To make players comfortable for long play sessions, the music must be good enough but not too intense or fast-paced.
2. Try to find existing packages for making the game UI instead of rolling mud balls.

Future Development

1. Interactive tutorial
   1. Guide the player with mini-tasks that help them understand the underlying mechanics.
2. Opening sequences
   1. Tell the background story with short animation clips or illustrations at the beginning of a new game session.
3. Multiple endings
   1. There can be different results based on the player's strategy: the player can choose to compromise with the lab and keep performing tasks till the end or break the exploitive system.
4. Save and load
   1. Players can save their progress, quit and resume the game during a session. They can also keep a profile across multiple game sessions.
5. More visual effect
   1. Add smoother transition to UI elements;
   2. Add particles and animations to Tamas, showing different states of the Tama for a better player experience.