One Year Later...

Skip this to avoid the "woe is me" self pity reflection rant.

It's been a full year since I made this RPGMaker during my final two quarters at UC Davis. Originally, the project was a simulation, a walkthrough of a video game development cycle from the initial pitch to a concrete protype/demo. Over the course of roughly 5-6 months, a small handful of undergrad students would create individual games of our own choosing and work our hardest to create fully realized protypes based on our initial pitches.

As I look back on the project, all I can think about is how much of a disappointment this game is, as it has all the markings of a lackadaisical undergrad student in the midst of graduating. Thinking back on it, I don't believe I gave my all into this project until probably the final 3-4 weeks making the game. It's a shame too because I think I was given a lot of leeway from the professor who oversaw all of our progress (shout out to Patrick Lemieux, I wish I took more of your courses). Additionally, I think by not challenging myself or by limiting myself, I didn't and couldn't grow as a game developer.

Some context. I started my time at UC Davis as an Art Studio/Cinema double major with the goal of becoming an animator. However, when the pandemic hit I became much more fixated in video games and game design than I was in animation or movies in general. I made a decision during the lockdown to make a slight change in career paths from animation to game design. In the end, I had only about a year and a half to learn game design with zero coding experience, zero knowledge of Unity or any 3D modeling software, and basically zero knowledge of game design in general. In that short time frame I covered solid ground, but in the end, I find myself more and more aware of how little I knew.  Like the Dunning-Kruger Effect, where the more I learned, the less confident I became. And when I became less confident, I became more and more discouraged from making the game that I wanted.

Additionally, I found myself unable to concentrate on making a game I could be proud of because of a bunch of dumb external reasons that don't make a lot of logical sense in hindsight. I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. In my final year at UC Davis, I found myself trying to socialize more than ever. Often, socializing and "hanging out with friends" had higher priority than game development. I chose not to pursue internships or opportunities to improve my development skills and opted for ephemeral social events that ultimately led to nothing that helps me in the present day. I even abused the leniency my peers and professor gave me as we meandered through a strange post-lockdown existence. Some might say that my behavior was somewhat warranted, two years of university life was sapped away due to Covid. But it definitely didn't help me make a better game.

In the end, my own laziness and incompetence created this final product. A product that doesn't even work properly. When my peers and I demoed our final projects to the public, my game didn't even work. Every game loop I tried to play would just freeze up because my assets or my blocks were too complex for the software to handle. In the end, I just featured my Davis Game Jam game "Garfield and the Legend of the Lasagna", another RPGMaker game featuring everyone's favorite fat orange tabby. That game had much more success than RoboCindy: it was a much shorter game loop with simple mechanics and silly, eye-catching graphics. Maybe I can learn a thing or two from the success of my dumb Garfield game... but that's a thought for another time. 

TL;DR: I changed career paths halfway through undergrad. I don't know how to code. I have above-average art skills. I procrastinated and balked on making a better game due to a mixture of dwindling confidence, graduation anxiety,  general incompetence, and pandemic-related nonsense. Because of all these things, I am generally unhappy with the final demo. I will breakdown the development of this game in a later postmortem.