Hey everyone,

I wrote a very similar post on my Steam game page, but wanted to share it here as well since I feel it's important for anyone who tries this game, be they an aspiring game dev or just a customer.
I also wanted this post to be sort of a postmortem about developing your first ever video game, the troubles that come with it and publishing it on digital platforms - I would like to share this anywhere I can, whenever I get the chance but for now this first part will be more useful for whoever (if anyone) plays my game.

I would just like to address the state of the game before going into the good stuff.
The game is fully playable, but as someone who never had a good computer or access to one his entire life, I wanted to make this game super scalable and accessible so that anyone could play it. I'll be working on an update to optimize the game and hopefully try and give more options in the Settings menu. This patch should come out within this year, but I don't want to give a concrete date.

Developing for multiple platforms

Even though the Mac version accounts for less than 1% of people interested in the game, I still plan on releasing it on Mac, most likely next month.
As a first time game developer or first time project creator on any art field, wanting to share your project with as many people as possible is probably in your mind or is even one of your priorities. This might be a wrong move, especially if you set yourself a deadline.

For first-timers, you should probably aim to develop for one platform only, this will reduce the post-launch stress of fixing bugs on a specific platform, as well as giving you all of the development time to focus on one platform.
However, I think this only applies if you're time-constraint. If you have all the time in the world, doing this as a hobby project (as I was), simply take your time and focus on working on the game. Then, if you want to, optimize the game for a different platform.

Even though there are game engines out there like Unity, that are able to build multiple versions of your game, one of my issues with the Mac version is that, while the game is playable, it runs really, really badly on the Mac, because I didn't have time to optimize it for that type of hardware.

Technical issues and deadlines

The game hasn't been optimized as much as it could have been.
While making this game, I wanted to prove 2 things:

• You can make a video game even if you don't know how to code.
• You can sell said game and maybe build a future out of it.

Only one of those, so far, has been proven right. I do not know how to program but I still managed to make my first video game and publish it on Steam and itch.io. This makes me super happy. But this is also one of the reasons why the game is so poorly optimized.
The other reason why it runs so poorly is because I set myself a deadline, and this is a big no-no if you're just working by yourself and doing this as a hobby. I set myself a deadline so that I wouldn't waste too much time working on this game as I still have a full-time job so this was just a hobby project.

Once you set yourself a deadline, you realize all the things you have to do and the little time you have to do them.

I started working on the game during the end of June 2020, and it was actually supposed to originally come out in August.
Then September.
Now October.
It wasn't enough! I still needed more time to fix some issues and add some of the content I cut out of the game. This bring me to the next point I wanted to make.
You need to learn where to cut corners. Don't think too big for your first project, you might want to your sweet time doing it so you get it right, but also don't take too long otherwise you will lose motivation. If something is stopping you from progressing further into development, maybe consider cutting it out from the game.

Suck at programming? No problem. First video game and selling it.

I do not know how to program. But that didn't stop me. Making video games is more accessible than it has ever been before. There are more schools offering game development courses and lessons than ever before, more game engines available to the public than ever before, and more YouTube videos and online courses from experienced game dev folks to private institutions more than ever before.

There is literally no excuse! If you have a computer, you can make a video game. You can also probably make a video game just on your phone, haven't looked into that.

I made this game through visual scripting using a Unity add-on called Playmaker. One of the reasons I made this game was to prove to myself that I could to a video game without knowing how to code. Playmaker is great for building prototypes, but you can also use it to make actual games, the quality of said games honestly just depends on how much time you have in your hands and which assets you use.

I appropriated a lot of free and bought assets on the Unity store to bring this game to life, and I like to think I did sort of a good job with it. If you're using assets to create your game, be careful and read the "read me's" and documentation as some of the assets may not be usable in commercial games.

Publishing the game on Steam wasn't super hard, but it can be a bit confusing. Luckily, the Steam documentation along with some very helpful YouTube comments and tutorials can guide you well through this process.
Publishing on itch is infinitely more simple and user-friendly. The support team is also really great and friendly should you need assistance or have questions.

Choosing the price is a pretty hard thing to do, personally speaking. I initially set out to sell it at $7.99 or more, as I had planned to have more content.
Unfortunately, I had to cut most of the content due to time-constraints, optimization issues and a barebones Settings menu. So I dropped it down to $4.99 instead of increasing it.
They say in the premium market of video games, a more expensive game can sell more than an inexpensive one. This is the complete opposite from the mobile market which is just something I found interesting so I thought I'd throw it in here.

You're a Roguelike, Harry.

Making a video game is very much like playing a real life version of a Roguelike. This is true for many things in life, each time you have to repeat a task you're probably looking to optimize doing said task to be more efficient - take less time, do it better than you ever did before, do more of it. 

Right now these are some lessons I learned to optimize my game development:

• Don't set yourself a deadline, it's nothing but unneeded stress if you're doing this as a hobby project.
• But also don't take too long, otherwise you WILL lose motivation, no matter how excited you are at the beginning.
• Work on the technical side of things first before building any content. With this I mean work on learning how to save data so that the player can save their progress, learn how to change the resolution output and quality settings of the game, learn how to have options to change audio settings.
• Pre-production is more important than you think. Audio gave me the most problems while making the game as there were many engines out there that me and my brother wanted to try. All of them gave us nothing but problems. In the end, we used Unity's built-in audio engine, and I scripted the audio through Playmaker. Not the most elegant solution, but we worked with what we had and int he end it did the job.
• If you want to make a video game, maybe do something a little bit more simpler than what I did! Walking simulators are, in fact, not easy to make. Any video game is pretty hard to do and get it right.

Honestly, I'm super happy with the final product. It definitely has issues, but man did I learn a lot throughout this process.
These were some long hour months, coming off a full-time job to work another 4-8 hours on my game wasn't always easy, but it was super rewarding (making it a bit addictive).

I gained some XP with this, and I can't wait to work on my next one. I have to apologize if some of the stuff I said went nowhere, I'm still coping with the stress of just releasing my first game :)

Thank you for reading, and I hope this was useful to some of you somehow.

Luis.