Sometimes, I only pretend to sleep.

This month felt both like an eternity and a single blink of the eye all at once. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't improved and learned a lot about game development. At the same time, however, I can see — more clearly defined — how much more I still need to do in order to make something I'm proud of.

For this project, I went in fresh. I didn't really know what I'd be making when the day of Metroidvania Month 16 rolled around. And truthfully, I didn't know how to do much more in Unity than set up a simple scene, implement a movable sprite, and... I guess anything that had a simple enough tutorial to follow.

Data persistence, code architecture... those were words I had heard, but I wasn't in any position to explain what they fully meant. I don't wholly think I can now. But I can brute force a bunch of code into a singleton and pray for the best.

To be honest, the only thing I felt confident about going into this project was the story and the art... or the character art at least. The first thing I did before anything else was sketch what I thought would be cool characters for whatever it was I'd eventually make.

It's not that I didn't anticipate that animating multiple 2D characters by hand would be taxing... but. Let's just say there's a reason why only Chry has a fully animated sprite. And for that matter, it's the same reason why only one enemy made it into the game and why most levels are still full of placeholders.

What I've learned — if nothing else — is how to set a more realistic scope. HollowKnight and Cuphead were certainly not animated in one month by a single guy who also has a day job looming over him. Would it be cool if I were the one to defy all odds and do it? Sure. But I probably would've died or gotten fired.

My scope problem was especially bad considering the originally intent level progression:

Whimsical is a wonderful tool for mapping out and planning levels. And I would have wonderfully designed a fully-functional game if this wasn't what a sunk a month into making. While the demo only retains Zone C and A, the rest were technically created. They had placeholders, could be mostly traversed, and there were ways to switch between them. But when "you have two days left" came knocking, I ranked 'two zones where you can't soft-lock the game' over 'let's hope no one jumps over here without X item'.

I certainly planned something, but I wouldn't say I planned correctly. I had checklists for myself even if the end goal was hazy. And therein lies what I think was the biggest problem. When I sat down to work, I had a general idea of what needed to get done, but not a concrete final vision. 

• "The game needs art, right? I'll just draw something cool." 
• "An inventory system! SotN has that, and it's perfectly reasonable to try to recreate it!"

Not only were art assets and dialog left on the cutting room floor but code was too. If I never open my Scripts folder for this project again, I'll be at peace. "Create as you feel" may work for painting... but it's a terrible way to code. I don't know how many bugs were created due to making functions on the fly and forgetting about them. And there are problems in the final build that still perplex me. Is there a reason why the switch prefab that was meant to spawn ladders in various levels works and loads perfectly in Unity's editor but just vanishes from existence in the build? Probably. But I learned that 5 hours before the deadline, so no more switches.

At the end of the day, I'm glad the deadline is finally here. Without one, this game would've remained in eternal limbo. Now, it gets to see the light of day in a finished-albeit-messy state. I think I was done with this project to be fair. 

The last week was less about sketching up cool characters and giving them personalities and backstories. It was less about planning grandiose features and shoving the actual implementation to a later day. All I did this week was take the remains of a 'dream' and turn it into something that didn't crash on start.

Now would be a time to metaphorically reference the game's title, but while the dream of this project becoming anything special has certainly been lost, it's given way to a new time of dream.

I'm excited to work on new things. I'll probably be in a loop of churning out unit tests for a good while, but working on this game has taught me a lot. Maybe it's taught me more of what not to do, but that's still knowledge gained. 

Now... maybe I do actually need to sleep.