Adaptation-some small thoughts afterwards

Adaptation has been my most successful game yet, both in terms of reception and plays. 

Here are some things I noticed or wondered:

Facebook groups, discord, subreddits, and genre boards

So I felt comfortable enough to post my game on multiple different community boards on itch.io, facebook groups, and subreddit. I had an easier time doing this because I felt my game belonged in certain genres. It also helped being active the discord chat for the actual game jam. This was the main source of traffic.

Mental stats might have been questionable:
So I had a secret stat for keeping track of where the characters mental health would go down. This would cause purposeful glitch. The most hostile of one would cause the wrong button to be pressed. I like having secrets and things being revealed in the game, but I think sometimes you want to give the player a little bit of a break and not caused instant game over frustration. 

Game loop logic

I'm not really a big fan of the bloated game loop code i wrote. Because of the mechanics of the game all the main logic was in one class, but that also meant all the logic was in one class. I felt like there might have been too much copy pasta code that a code reviewer would cringe at. Part of the process of learning to become better at game dev.

Is this really a game?

About the halfway point I was freaking out a little bit about why would someone want to play this game.  To me it felt more like a toy than a game. Then after a while of testing through it, I did find some fun for it. It also helped that its a free game. It only cost me time and effort to make. This was also meant for a game jam so some bad ideas could be expected. I then plowed through my doubts and get my game ready to publish. 

Bugs sucks(Especially for different pcs)

I still seem to have trouble publishing games for their resolutions. Though now I think I can at least get another game published for this size for the webgl platform again with less trouble.

Instructions vs discovery

One of my major faults with this game was a lack of instructions on what the game expects you to know and what it wants you to figure out.  This is especially weird since this game is completely focused on the player messing with the UI. One of the patches I made did add indicators to let the players know if they were on the right track. There was a problem with no labels on the indicators so probably didn't help as much as I would like.

Things to look into for future games

Things I want to start working on: 

Dialogue boxes and text systems.

Better instructions and giving feed back

better UI polish

I think I'll stick to horror for my next game but I might focus on a different part of UI.