Post Mortem: Blazin’ Balls
DrMisty shares a quick Blazin’ Balls post mortem.
The two key points to keep in mind about Blazin' Balls is that a) is was a project chosen to bolster my confidence after Space Pirates and b) it was supposed to form an example project for a book, which has now fallen by the wayside. I didn't know that at release time, or I would have done some things differently. Let's break her down Mr DJ!
Post Mortem: Abduction Action!
Kris Steele follows the recent release of Abduction Action! with a post mortem for it.
Abduction Action! was intended to be completed in 3 to 4 months, thus releasing in the tale end of 2009. The initial concept would have you just abducting helpless Earthlings while avoiding gunfire from hostile ones. After a few months in development, it became clear that this concept didn't give the player enough to do in order to fill five levels with interesting content (and fun!). At this point the decision was between dropping some levels and making this a very basic game or keeping the levels and adding more to do. I felt the later option would make for a much more enjoyable game and I really hated to waste what I felt was an interesting concept on a very small game that could be quickly dismissed. The scope increase lead to development of Abduction Action! to take double the initial estimate but in doing so it became a far better game.
Continue to read about the good, the bad and the ugly.
Post Mortem: Gum Drop Celestial Frontier, Neo Terra and Impossible Shoota
This is the Post Mortem Mania edition.
This time, Elbert Perez doesn’t just share one or two, no, it’s a whole bunch of three Post Mortems: First, there’s the Gum Drop Celestial Frontier Post Mortem, as a second he wrote up a Neo Terra Postmortem and last but not least he dropped the Impossible Shoota Postmortem.
Post Mortem: Nasty
Another great post mortem coming from Kris, the creator of the Xbox Live Indie Games game Nasty.
Post Mortem: Horn Swaggle Islands
Beringela wrote up some thoughts about the performance of Horn Swaggle Islands on the Xbox LIVE Indie Games channel. Writes Beringela:
Horn Swaggle Islands was released in July 2009, and so has had a fair crack of the whip as regards selling time on the Xbox Marketplace. As a game, HSI did pretty well in reviews; it’s a competent Tower Defence clone with some nice features. It is fair to say also that sales have been very disappointing, in fact we still haven’t broken 200 sales as of the time of writing. So why might this be so, and what can be learned from it?
Head over to the post to read the Good & Bad.
Post Mortem: Kissy Poo
Looks like Friday is Post Mortem day in XNA land. After the previous Space Pirates from Tomorrow post mortem now comes in the one George W. Clingerman with his Post Mortem of Kissy Poo. Writes that George:
A short while ago I became a REAL game developer with the release of an XBLIG I helped create called “Kissy Poo”. Overall this game has been a huge success. It has far exceeded my original expectations of sales and was just a really fun project to work on. (In case you were wondering I was expecting to sell around 500 copies and we’re right now hanging around 1200 copies sold!). Now though, I want to take some time to reflect a bit and share what went well and what I would have done differently. I think it’s good for any project to take that time and who knows, maybe it will be useful for someone else besides me!
Read the whole drama at the source.
Post Mortem: Space Pirates from Tomorrow
DrMisty published a post mortem for Space Pirates from Tomorrow over at the Mstar Games blog. Here’s a teaser to fill this post:
Wowsers. What a month. After about 6 months of continuous development, testing and tweaking and one aborted launch, Space Pirates has finally made it out in to the real world. It's considered "best practice" in a lot of Indie circles to examine exactly what happened, what went well, and what went badly. I'd like to think I've conducted myself pretty well throughout the experience, but every aspect of our work is up for questioning in this post mortem process. So we'll go back to the very beginning, consider the viability of the overall idea of Space Pirates, our ability to implement it and get it to market in a playable and reliable form, the impact of the various things we have to do on the XNA Creator's Club, our pre- and post- release media management, how we related to our customers and the impact on the MStar Games "brand".