Snake vs Bunnies Postmortem

The game’s got 7 players total in the first week. That’s 7 more than I dreaded! This was a purely learning project, I’ve got useful skills playing with Unity and creative tools. These are transferable for new projects.

Unity

Unity is amazing. It overshadows all my previous attempts in gamedev, including usage of LibGDX. So much of the essential things are already done by Unity, all I needed was to focus on the actual game, as opposed to boilerplate code or any other sort of plumbing.
There’s a lot of tutorials and Q&As about Unity all over the internet and they helped me ramp up quickly. I started with a free Coursera Unity course. Even though it has a lot of content on programming which I had to skip, it’s also a nice gentle introduction to the engine.
Learning curve is not steep. It’s realy easy to do simple things in Unity.
Unity is quite logical and well organized. Turns out it’s easy to do intermediate things as well.

Assets

I’ve made all game assets except for music myself, and it wasn’t that hard.
I’ve found a free soundtrack on freesound.org, the composer was fine with its usage.
Even though I can’t really paint, I was surprised by how easy and satisfying it was to draw sprites using the right tools (Krita and a Wacom tablet). However, drawing took significant time, comparable with coding. I had to cut the art scope short: didn’t improve too much on the quality and didn’t do animation. But if I had unlimited time, I could’ve done it.

Time management and scope

As usual, 20% of perceived work took 80% of actual time. But without doing this 20% the game would’ve been utterly unfinished and unplayable.
Being in this 20% is also less rewarding and I felt I’m losing interest and thinking about next projects during this final phase of development. This explains why there are so many unfinished games laying around.

Marketing

I didn’t spend any money on marketing. All I did was a tweet and a couple Reddit posts.
I’ve invested some time in a trailer video that, in my view explains the essence of the game well enough.
If the itch.io statistics is trustable, my SMM did pretty much nothing. Vast majority of visitors came directly from the platform. But also numbers are so small they may not representative.

It seems like a casual game has to be mobile first these days. Mine was desktop only and that likely lost some audience. Anyway, check out Snake vs Bunnies in my portfolio.