Not really sure how to do a post-mortem but here we go…

I want to thank the 250+ people who downloaded and played ‘anthrodynia’! I was interested in doing O2A2 for a while, and then time went by so fast I forgot O2A2Q had begun, so I had actually started making this a few days late (ish.)

‘Anthrodynia’ wasn’t supposed to actually play out like this, but O2A2 has a very strict WC of 1000 words, so I had to cut out much of the content I had already made my mind up on. I hadn’t actually made any moves to actualised Wyn’s story yet when I began O2A2Q, but I had plenty of sketches and random notes about the plot and the choice trees.

In the original idea, Wyn would’ve taken a longer time to be noticed by the player instead of just randomly bumping into them on the street. They wouldn’t really notice if they had seen him before, until they get some free tickets to a local escape room seasonal attraction, and Wyn happens to work there part-time for that season. In a last post, I shared an old sprite, I have decided to remake that sprite because I want to keep with the pixelated artwork for the full game, but here it is again:

[old vs. new sprite]

He definitely looks different..!

I had a really difficult time actually writing the script, I feel as though writing is definitley my weak point in games development (not to mention coding…. there were 2 really bad bugs imo and i totaly missed them! but I was also sick around that time so i blame it on that.) I actually ended up going over the word limit by a few hundred words once I managed to get into the flow, and had a hard time cutting the excess off because I felt like it added more atmosphere wise, but I also wasn’t willing to cut the endings so the excess descriptions had to go!

I used some free assets I had stashed away for (eventual use…) the background image of the street I heavily butchered with filters and dithering actually appears in the current game I have been working on for like… 2 years (granted most of that was/is hiatus because my life’s been really messy as of late.) I used Bosca Ceoil to create a very short loopable track, I love using the software as it’s extremely straigthforward, though I know some people may not like how chiptune-y the tracks might/will sound. I kind of prefer it, but then again I listen to a lot of old game soundtracks that were made on sythn chips and the like.

Honestly the writing took by far the longest, I spent a lot of time editing it and trying to shuffle words around, and even just getting them to come in the first place. Second was the coding because I suck at coding, but with the word limit I had to keep things simple (good for me because that’s about as much as I can handle right now!) The artwork was really quick because I had assets on hand, and the sound aspect didn’t take super long either! I am really surprised I managed to finish this in about a week total (if you count editing and everything else, not just making assets and what not.)

I hope I can make more short games, because with my first project (never published… yet!) I aimed too high, and I was also really burnt out, in a crappy living situation etc. I’m in a slightly better place now, so I want to keep pushing out short and sweet content!

I’m excited to work on the full game (I mean this is already full, but I had to cut a bunch of stuff out so I want to add it back in and use some of the ideas I had in the original idea too!) and I hope people will be excited to play that too! Thank you for reading & (maybe) playing too!