Night of the Loving Dead: Post-Mortem

Early this year I decided to dive more into game development and I released my first game, Night of the Loving Dead, in late March. Now that the game has been out in the wild for a few months, I decided to reflect on the experience and share what I�ve learned throughout the process. I hope this information is helpful to someone or at least entertaining.

If you want to try the game, you can check it out here; I'd really appreciate any feedback you may have! The premise is you play as a skeleton that must find various parts of his body to become whole again and reunite with the love left behind upon death.



Lessons Learned

Staying Motivated - When working on a game project, it can be hard to stay motivated. In order to make sure I got the game finished, I tried every day to work on it at least a little. I didn�t succeed every day, but I came pretty close. As long as you keep working on it, even if one day all you do is add a button, it is progress. The biggest danger in taking a day off is that it can quickly become 2 days off, which becomes 3 and so on.

Another way I stayed motivated was by sharing the game with friends. I had buddies play the game early and often. The positive reinforcement gained from that went a long way in keeping me interested in the project.

You Can�t Please Everyone - It is important to take the feedback of your players seriously, but it is equally important to realize that not everyone is going to like your game. Initially, a lot of people complained that the game was too easy so I added a new enemy (the floating eyeball) and then people complained that it was too difficult. In response to this, I gave the player more health to begin with. I actually liked the game better without the eye, but it seemed like less complaints came in so I left it at that.

Currently I am hard at work on my next game and have so many ideas for others that it is sometimes hard to stay focused! Anyway, that's pretty much it; I hope this wasn't a waste of your time.

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LOOK WHO CAME:

zinger   

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