Starcom & Dev Postmortem

I recently finished my second Flash game, Starcom, developed in Flex Builder using AS3 and Flex components.

I've started writing a detailed postmortem on the development process to organize my thoughts around what I did right and what mistakes I could have avoided. Here's the link to the postmortem. Hopefully it will be interesting to other developers:

http://lab.wx3.com/wordpress/?page_id=3

Game link (Newgrounds):
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/499775

Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions (either about the game itself or the postmortem document)!

Very nice long postmortem.

Quote:

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“This is a deferred instantiation object. It’s not critical. I’ll finish it later.” Flash was procrastinating like a programmer.

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I laughed, I cried, I loved the post mortem. I'm also going to try and learn from your discussion regarding overuse of inheritance. I am going to have to be sure I don't go the same way, as I am just starting to write down my class design for my current game, and it looks a lot like the design you were unhappy with in Starcom. Time to look into composition and inheritence to see if they can help me.

I am also VERY interested in the opinions of other experienced game makers here regarding your disparate scores on Kongregate vs Newgrounds. How many plays were you getting on Newgrounds? You gave more info about your Kong traffic...

I am very happy you took the time to organize your thoughts and write them down, and even happier you chose to share them. I think you will really thank yourself for this if you have not already.

I personally find writing down my thoughts to be a great way to organize them better and see the gaps that I have not yet thought of.

I've been wanting to make a game that could capture Battlestar Galactica's action scenes. I never got past a couple prototypes...so congratulations! I actually liked the game, besides that it runs a bit slow on my old machine (my fault, not yours ;) ).

I liked the postmortem. I think more games should have ones like these.

Thanks for the comments, I'll continue to flush it out!

Really interesting to read, thanks for sharing!

Nice postmortem. Let us know when you write up the monetization bit (though that might make more sense in a couple of months). We're using flex too, and basically staying clear of MXML and going with pure AS; think you'll do the same next time?