Postmortem of Moth Emporium

This game was a bunch of bad decisions on my part and it's a miracle it got somewhat finished on time. 

Overall, I did also learn a lot. Although the decision to make the game in Godot was not the smartest in regards to time it really helped me learn way more about coding than I ever would have doing it in anything else. Part of the reason why there is not a ton, or at least as much as I intended, content wise is because I spent all my time building it from scratch with no tutorials, as I couldn’t really find many that did exactly what I wanted.

Now the game’s code is by no means objectively good, however it gets the job done and I did it all from my own mind, which is a first for me. My previous games were all just a punch of tutorials frankensteined together, this one I actually learned the fundamentals of coding. And I think in the long run that is actually way more important and meaningful.

Despite also how I wish it had more story wise, I am very proud of what I made because I had made it all from scratch.

Although one major mistake on my part was anticipating how long this was going to take me, I anticipated this taking way less time than it actually did and that is one of my major regrets is not starting it sooner, and by starting I mean actually in the game engine making it… I spent too much time just thinking about it instead of actually doing it.

Now that I have finished it and can reflect on the crime scene that is the code, another major area that I need to improve on is the way I structured the dialogue system. I was just kinda writing functions all willy-nilly with no real structure, I should have looked more into some of the more complicated coding concepts such as Classes and Dictionaries, which I kinda avoided while making this game because they scare me. Basically my biggest problem was not that I didn't understand the code I wrote but it was more I got lost in the functions, I had no way to keep track, in a good way, of all the reactions to certain dialogue options and whatnot. I spent so much time figuring out what was what instead of continuing with new dialogue options.

Another option would have been to look into plug-ins, I know Godot has some very good dialogue plug-ins, but then again, I anticipated this being easier than it was and thought brute forcing it would do the trick just fine.

Ultimately, I am very proud of my silly little game and I hope I can find more ways to harass Mr. Walker.