marigold post mortem & the future
well, i've decided to can the project I spent about a year on. That project was Marigold, a Yume Nikki type game. I'm gonna go over some of the good, bad and the future of my development in this blog post.
firstly, ill talk about the project! Marigold was an incredible opportunity for me as a game developer, this was my first real project. Marigold followed a diver who becomes stranded and trapped in a cave. Hopeless, she begins to suffocate and succumb to her oxygen deficiency, leading her to have vivid and wild dreams based on her experiences. This game was heavily inspired by Yume Nikki, but i did not want it to be a 1:1 fangame. The story was pretty important, and the overall progression was quite different. I wanted to expand on Yume Nikkis formula and go further into the concept of collecting, as that was always my favorite part of that game. Finding items that unlocked further things within the dreams, and meaningful unlocks that go beyond effects. For example; there were going to be prestige effects. In other words, effects that you could further upgrade into new visual variants, and some even did new things! It was a system i've never seen before in a fangame, and perhaps i'll revisit this concept in future.
so the reason i cancelled it... well there were several reasons.
- technical debt
- rpg maker mz (oops)
- old art i wasnt satisfied with
Technical Debt & MZ
So going into this project, i frankly did not know what the fuck i was doing lol. I didnt know how to program, make (good) pixel art, design a game ETC. Somehow, i even made the mistake of having the entire games pixel art in 32x32 tiles which I realized i did NOT want. This realization came when I was still new, so woopsie. I foolishly decided to use RPG MAKER MZ, because I figured it would be the most modern and have the best features... oops! I came to realize that I couldn't have been more wrong, and that MZ is pretty much a piece of crap for making games in this sort of style. As i learnt more and more things, I felt like I was pushing through mud. There came a point a few months into development where I fucked up everything so catastrophically that I was left with essentially no choice but to remake almost all the art and start from scratch. I remade all the text as a bitmap, because MZ has built in anti-aliasing on all text. I remade the menus to look more like 2k3, ETC. Heaps of my foundational efforts were JUST in making MZ feel and look like 2k3. A lot of which people wouldn't even appreciate!!!
A lot of the games critical systems were built during a time in which I was relatively new to programming, and working in those cluttered systems down the line became a complete pain in the ass. The effects system was made from my mind, quite poorly might I add. Most of my variables, events ETC were completely all over the fucking place and impossible to keep track of. The point i'm getting at is working with Marigold was a process filled with a lot of friction. Game development is a difficult process as is, and i've come to learn that as a developer, you want to add as little extra friction as humanely possible. Unfortunately, as a fledgling dev I did not take this approach and accidentally spilled wayyy too much chemical X into Marigold.
Art
here look at this:
yeah so thats one of the first assets I made for this game because I did not know how to make pixel art! My process went as follows...
start on world 1, design it, make the art, become better at art, start on world 2, look back at world 1, hate it and wish to remake it, repeat
this genuinely happened more times than i can count lol, this lead to a frustrating cycle of constant respriting and dissatisfaction with the game. Also i'm writing this 2 months after i started the initial blog because i forgot about it, so i'm just ending it here. it was a good run but its over!