The following is a self-review and post-development analysis of the traps and triumphs of my own game. My apologies in advance for any run-on sentences, overuse of parenthetical remarks, hyphenated phrases and attempts at humor.
A post-mortem.
One word I would use to describe the developement of this game would be "laziness".
Ratings:
Graphics: 2 of 5 Stars
Not much (but some) effort was put into the sprites.
Music & Sound: 4 of 5 Stars
The music is not that great but blends nicely with the retro sound effects.
Gameplay: 2.5 of 5 Stars
Elements of running, jumping and shooting are used heavily.
Bugginess: -3 of 5 Stars
Game crippling events happen at random intervals.
Development tools:
What this thing started as:
Post-Apocalipstick is basically a mod of Seifer Tim's
beginners tutorial found on the Flixel forums. I was just following the tutorial along and enjoying Flixel and AS3 when suddenly I wanted to actually make a game, like for reals. It struck me that even with my limited experience and only the basics given to me by Seifer Tim's tutorial I could make one of the best games ever and be on the front page on Kongregate. Well, let me tell you. LAUGH. OUT. LOUD. I made the total newb mistake of being way overly ambitious right from the start while Post-Apocalipstick was still barely conceived in my mind. Poor thing didn't even stand a chance...
What this thing became:
That was all back in November 2009 near the end of my Fall semester (I am, Lord willing, getting my Computer Programming AAS in May). If you follow Seifer Tim's tutorial you end up with a decent scrolling-based platform-based shooting-based game thingy. It's a game but there's no ending and no goal other than to kill green ninjas (which is actually a pretty good goal, now that I think about it). After spending a weekend finishing Tim's tutorial I took some time off from the then nameless game to focus on my schooling.
...
Breathing a sigh or relief for having passed all 5 classes I worked intermittently (AI tweaking, getting my little brother to draw characters in MSPaint) on the nameless game (also during this time, I came up with the gameplay mechanic of "the game should get faster as you play" while making pizza one day) until leaving for Christmas vacation in California. Then I came back and worked on it some more. Cool story, huh?
Anyway, somewhere around there I also came up with the name "Post-Apocalipstick". At the time I didn't connect the name with the game. I was hoping someday a friend would come to me and ask the question "What do you think I should name my over-the-top glam-rock band?" to which I would quickly reply "Post-Apocalipstick".
Through working on the game here and there every few weeks before and after Christmas(did I mention this all happened around Christmas?) it became apparent that continuing work on it would probably be a waste of time. Nameless (actually it's working title was "Brad VS The World" cause my brother Brad drew the characters) wasn't very good, at all.
Here are some early versions from that time.
What it then became(after Christmas and all that):
I had decided by this time that the still nameless game would consist of 5 levels that were pretty easy to beat the first time and would, the next time you played, get faster and harder. Also by this time I had run into THE BUG. At random times the amount of enemies the player is required to kill would jump to a strange number; "4294" or something like that, thus making the game unbeatable(unless you stuck around and killed 4,294 or whatever guys). This bug is still in the game and very common. You've probably run in to it if you've played the game.
For a while I had kind of given up on this nameless steamy pile of a game. I had tried to fix the killer bug many times with no success at all. My dream of building a top of the line Flash game out of this little Flixel tutorial was crushed. :(
How it got finished:
Back to California my family and I went in early February. One day while waiting around to go to a wedding I was reading a certain
thread on TIGSource. I was suddenly inspired to finish the nameless game at all costs and release it as my first game in a long line of hopefully better games to come.
It seems many a TIGSource veteran's philosophy is to "just release something". So I did.
I finally decided to call it Post-Apocalipstick, polished up the gameplay, made some sounds and music with a really cool program called High-C, and drew colorful squiggles all over all the sprites(my 23 month old daughter would be proud). Then, I called it a work game, uploaded it to Kongregate, fixed the size since the bottom was cut off on Kongregate, re-uploaded it to Kongregate and watched the negative comments trickle in(ok, maybe more like "drip in").
Conclusion:
My excuse for inflicting Post-Apocalipstick is that I just wanted to have my own game on Kongregate to brag about(heh, yeah right...) and to be able to say "I'm a game developer" and back it up.
I love being an indie game developer because you can release a game like this and there may just be a few people who think of it as a piece of art and enjoy it. And, if nobody likes it there arent too many consequences since I really just made it for the thrill of, well... making it. :)
Here's another screenshot:
