Devtober Postmortem

This postmortem is part of the submission to Devtober Game Jam. It is a little less of a game jam and a little more of practicing good and consistent work practices. 

Elowen's light is not all the way done at the time of this postmortem, but it has made a lot of progress this month.

What we updated:

• Added a marketing person.
• Added more chunks, and they progressively get added to the game, to scale the difficulty to the player's experience level.
• Re-added a framework for a story for the main character, and three supporting characters. 
• Re-did sound effects, and added some random elements to the music loop
• Added a main menu
• Added some visual effects
• Added final artwork for home interior

What went right:

• Focus - I was able to resist doing other projects, and focus on this one. 
• Ease of creating - Code for the story was in three different places, and now it is all in one, making it easier to edit. The debug version displays which chunk you are on to help with feedback. and I added some temporary UI to help skip ahead in the story.
• Trello - The task tracking with Trello help to keep our priorities straight, and plan out the work.
• Adding a mid-ground. Early on in the development, it was a goal to be able to add a mid-ground to improve the sense of depth and distance traveled, but it was discarded as being too art-expensive. I found a super easy way to use a second camera to look at the old platforms, and a thing we had given up on was suddenly possible within 2 hours of effort. I don't know how to best look for opportunities like that, but it felt like such a leap.

What went wrong:

• Our team was pulled in different directions, and we did not make as much progress as we hoped in some directions. But since we are all hobbyists, development is planning to be at our own pace.
• None of the work was done poorly (as far as I can tell yet) and nothing had to be re-done, so I'm very glad with the progress we did make.

Ways to improve:

• We could devote more time to play testing, as a procedural generated games have a lot of things that may go wrong only occasionally.
• I could list out soft deadlines and describe exactly the state of the game at each one to be clearer to work towards.