1-Bit Explorer - A Post-mortem
So, I realeased 1-BIT EXPLORER earlier this year (April on Itch, following with the browser playable release on August in Newgrounds and on November on Itch), and I think a post-mortem is in order. This is more for me to collect my thoughts and conclusions, but if my experience can help anyone else, great!
Sooooo, let's begin!
Massive impression
The game is by no means big. The main quest can be finished in under 30 minutes, and I believe it is like 3-4 hours tops if you look into everything it has, but users described it as "Massive" and "Full of stuff". I believe the approach to make a small scope game which allows multiple ways to interact and multiple points of interest made the content that was there feel bigger, so people didn't just see a short 3-4 hour game, but a multitude of optional paths that expanded the main game from under 30 minutes to over 2 hours.
Immersion
Some users told that they were able to get lost in the world I created, losing track of time while they played the game. This is wonderful. Before I could only dream of this happening, but now it has. It is amazing to know that someone forgot problems, struggles and worries and just got lost in joy for a bit because of something I did.
Traces of a Small community forming
One think that I loved about the reviews was the user interactions. People saying "I got this by doing that" and "I am stuck! How did you guys do this?". One of my actual dreams was for people to ask about combat and a user actually replying "There is combat?? Where?! I need to find it" and this happened! It still makes me smile to think about!
Doesn't look like RPG Maker
For me this is a great compliment, because the users didn't bother with "This was made in X engine", but they cared about "This was a good experience!".
Too long and stale intro
This was a single complain on the reviews, but on that I took to heart. The intro was developed at the end of the project, and I believe it shows. This showed me that I need to cut some dialogs short and be more objective, specially in the early game, where players are not invested yet and can just close the whole thing.
The overshooting movement problem
Looking at game play, I saw people overshoot where they wanted to go quite a bit. This might be due to the tile based movement of RPG Maker, or the speed of the character, I don't know, but this is something that needs to be addressed in future releases. Maybe additional testing? Movement plugins? Need to figure it out.
Consistant patterns and tips
This was actually a bit of a problem for 1 player (that I know of), but I completely understand his frustration. At one point, you need to talk to someone in a PUB to start a quest, but this NPC is in the middle of a bunch of other NPCs which have no dialogs whatsoever. The pattern I made in this PUB is that people at the tables have no dialog, so there was this barrier to enter this quest that shouldn't exist. The other NPCs could give tips and hints to the issue that lead to the quest, leading the player without just saying "Hey, talk to that guy".
So when I add NPCs, they should have a purpose, even if that purpose is just giving a small tip to the player about an optional quest.
The collectathon
Some players had issues with the collectathon part, specially because it is needed to get one of the endings. Maybe with a smaller collection of items (3 to 5) it would've been better, but 25 got frustrating to some.
Clarity above all else
One part that gave players some issues was the compass to pass the desert. For me the design was completely clear, but the stylization of the arrows was confusing to a lot of players. This led to them finding the secondary use of the compass BEFORE the primary one, which is an issue. I should make clarity a bit more of a priority in every aspect of the game.
Additional testing for big and small infuriating bugs
Some bugs escaped my testing (and I did test a lot), so I should be a bit more careful. One of the bugs was game breaking, which is awful (quickly fixed. It was a dumb bug, very dumb) and another was a bit infuriating, causing people to search for something that was not there. This last one goes against the core principle of the game: EXPLORATION.
Release on browsers with the option to download
Release with only the download option was a bad idea... I should have released it with browser play from day 1. Today the browser play is larger than the downloads, and I understand why. Browser play gives little to no barrier of entry, while download requires additional actions (and trust) from the users. They didn't know me, so why should they trust my ZIP file?
Conclusion
All in all the experience was great! I got to see my game played on YouTube by some channels, a (very) small community form around the world I created and I really got to bring some fun and joy to an (small) audience! Althought I didn't make a dime out of this, I think I accomplished what I wanted :)
Thanks for reading!
If you'd like to test out the game, you can find it here:
Itch: https://fiddleling.itch.io/1-bit-explorer
Newgrounds: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/897242
You can also follow additional projects at: https://fiddleling.itch.io/
