I recently released my first game Alex Hill: Whispers at White Oak Inn.  Here are some challenges from my first game that I will take into the next game.

   •I’ve been using Metahumans. They’ve been a headache to use, but thankfully Epic Games recently optimized them. The only problem is that the hair caused the game to crash on computers with integrated graphics cards, but I only found that out after releasing the game and I had to spend a week redoing all the hair. I will need to do more play testing for this next game.

   •The fan base for my game tend to use older computers to try to play games. I’ve played with the idea of moving from Unreal Engine over to Godot since Godot is a lighter engine. I’m not convinced it’s the best idea yet. I’m just looking into it. I might make a small game I could upload to itch.io just to test the engine out and see if it would work for what I need it to do. I would also need to figure out options for character models. Metahumans is free which is super nice and they have some nice tools that come in handy, but I wouldn’t be able to use them for Godot since they’re Unreal Engine-specific. The only comparable option out there is Character Creator 4, but it’s not free and I really don’t like their terms of use. The other challenge would be adding time the time it takes to make the game since I would need to take time to learn a new engine. Maybe by game three moving over would be a better option.

   •Developing for Mac computers is a challenge. Since most developers develop for PC, there is a lot less documentation when you run across Mac specific issues. I can understand why developers don’t often develop games for Macs. It’s already a challenge to develop games with so many types of computers out there. Developing for Mac just adds one more set of bugs you have to fix, but 1/5 of the people who bought my game were playing on Mac so I will likely continue to do so for now.

   •Feedback can be confusing. I’ll have one person tell me they loved a puzzle in the game, and the next will say they didn’t think it was a good puzzle. One person loves the music. The next says they couldn’t stand it. One person said the controls were intuitive. The next says the controls were clunky. It’s kind of wild how all over the place feedback can be. It’s challenging to decide what feedback to keep in mind for the next game, and what feedback to let go. I think I’ll keep in mind feedback that was mostly consistent, while continuing to focus on making the kind of game I like, and then hope that other people enjoy it as well.

   •Game flow was a consistent issue for players in the last game. Progression in the game was primarily done by talking to people, but players didn’t always know they needed to talk to characters again after getting new information from characters. I think in this next game I’ll try to have progression less focused on talking to people to some extent or I will try to have more help for the player to know who they need to talk to and why.

   •I really want to add little notifications for the player’s in-game phone for this next game. I thought about adding it to the first game, but I was limited in my coding knowledge and my time so it didn’t end up happening.



As for this next game, I’m more than halfway done with the first draft of the script. I like to get that nailed down before I do anything else in the game, so that’s my main focus right now.