The process for making this game was probably the fastest and easiest for me so far. It was very relaxing to do in small snippets of free time. Of course there are a lot of areas in which the workflow can be improved and this is what this post-mortem is for.

What went right

-Paper planning

I basically envisioned all of the game in a tiny bit of paper in a few minutes. This helped a lot during developement. I think having such a small area to sketch is also a factor since I've tried something similar in the past on several piece of papers and didn't work quite well. So for now on "if it fits in the palm of a hand it's good"

-Music in Bitsy

The tune editor in Bitsy 8 was a great introduction for me since I'm mainly a musician, but it never clicked with me until now. Paper helped once again here, since I've decided to write everything first on paper and then program it into the editor. The original music sketches were longer but I think 4-8 bars is the perfect lenght for bitsy tunes.

-Writing one room at a time

Just 1 hour a day to create a room with sprites, npcs and dialogue was perfect for me.

What went wrong

-Logic headache

Coming up with the logic to unlock the true ending was a nightmare. I wish you could have AND IF branching dialogues. Also working with variables is not my forte. Multiple variables never again.

-Please use consistent page break technique

Next time: put the pagebreak tags.

-Testing and exporting

The worst thing about Bitsy8 is that by default music stops everytime you talk to a character. I removed this thanks to a "hack" that you do by removing some code in the html files. But for some reason, everytime I edited the code to do that, some new bugs appeared and it was a pain to fix them or make some changes to the game and then re-export and edit the html all over again.