DracoFighter Post-Mortem

I was searching through my old notes and found one labelled "What I Learned from DracoFighter." I had completely forgotten my plan to make a post-mortem video! Well, making into an article will be easier (and probably more accurate), so that's what I'll do now.

If you don't know what a post-mortem is, it's decently common in the game development community, and is essentially just a retrospective on the whole project. What happened, how I felt, what I regret, what I learned, etc. Let's start from the beginning.

Devtober

DracoFighter was my pipe dream game, and my original idea (which will become DracoFighter 2) was sized down into something that could feasibly be done by a single developer, most likely influenced by the things I learned at the time and the realization that getting a team for DracoFighter was unrealistic. One day I decided to go at it in Unity, but I just didn't have the experience to do it yet, and it fell apart rather quickly. 

After making several smaller games and really coming to love Godot, I decided to have a go at it again! ...Then the project was put on hold for several months. Motivation was difficult to muster, and the summer went by really quickly. There was one final push that allowed the project to come together -- Devtober! This was like the gamedev equivalent of Inktober, where you would work on something gamedev-related every day for the whole of October. I dusted off my very basic prototype of DracoFighter and got to work.

...And it worked amazingly! Having to publicly post progress put pressure on me to get results, and while it pressured for visuals over good programming, it was still the push I needed to get a ton of progress on the game. Notably, people loved it! Having an inside look at game development and updating it regularly was something that people really seemed to enjoy, something that I had forgotten as someone who loved that stuff myself.  Either way, the game went from "Draco can move and use one move" to a fully working demo in just one month, which is a little insane.

That was the push I needed to get addicted to the loop of game development. The next few years would be me working on DracoFighter on and off in between homework assignments. Much of what I learned from previous gamedev projects came in handy, but this was still the largest project I had worked on up until that point, so there was a lot to learn about managing scope and spreading out tasks. I also had to playtest the game frequently with friends and family, much more than my other games, to make sure that everything worked and felt exactly like I wanted it to. 

Finishing The Game

Fast forward near the end of development, and I had reached a lull. One of my biggest regrets with DracoFighter was not fully polishing the game, but if I didn't push for the game's release, it would have taken a very long time before the game ever reached stores. Polish is something that's taken for granted with larger games, but it's actually very difficult to figure out how to do without the experience. 

Either way, the marketing aspect is another difficult thing I wanted to focus on. First of all, you need a LOT of assets -- I didn't know that Steam actually requires a game trailer, so I had to put together one (with a friend's help!) along with stuff like screenshots, Steam banners, and announcing the release across different platforms. Managing the different versions of the game was also obnoxious! There are a lot of steps after finishing a game that I wasn't ready for, especially as someone who was used to just throwing something out on itch.io. 

After a lot of work and a lot of stress, the game was out. I found a marketing angle, posted it on Reddit, and was pleasantly surprised at the big reaction! Since most Reddits have rules about advertising, I justified my post by turning it into a Q&A, which also got it a lot of engagement (and an excuse for me to talk about my game!). In just a bit over a week after the game launched, I reached 100 downloads on Steam! I was incredibly happy and proud of being able to make something this big...

What I Learned from DracoFighter

Anyway, to wrap up the article, I'll bring in my old notes about what I learned, and comment briefly on each of them. There are 18 in total.

1) It doesn't matter how good your game is, how much effort was put into it, nor how much time you spent on it -- when you're selling a game, it needs to present an idea that people love, and then deliver on that idea in-game
2) If your game doesn't look good, people won't play it

These are big ones for marketing! I know this as a gamer (I'm often turned off of games if I don't like how they look), but as a developer it's easy to try to ignore it. "Once they get their hands on it, they'll know it plays great!" But if you can't convince them to get their hands on it, they'll never get to that point. Regardless of how good your game is, you need to convince your target audience that your game is what they want to play.

3) If you want to recreate a genre, people will bring their preconceptions and probably point it out as a flaw if it doesn't work

This was a funny one! Even though DracoFighter was SUPPOSED to be different, about half of the complaints I got were essentially "this is not like the games I play." Regardless of how you feel about the comments, you have to keep critique in mind. Some of them I completely ignored ("add more combo extensions" directly opposed my goals), but others may have to be considered or compromised ("jumping/blocking is confusing" is directly being addressed in DF2), especially if you realize that a feature works against the goals you set for yourself. Remember to always keep in mind WHY you're recreating a genre, what the consequences of change carry, and how to fix those issues.

4) The things you spent the most time on will often be overlooked by the majority, but usually appreciated by everyone

There's a lot of features of game development that people will never ever comment on, but you can usually tell when it's gone well. Nobody complains about combos being frustrating, so that means all my combo-related goals were successful! Nobody said the music was annoying, so all my time finding the best royalty free music paid off! Feedback will often be about negatives, so always remember that what people DON'T complain about is also important.

5) Whatever you imagine about players is false unless proven true by testing multiple different people

Playtesting was UNBELIEVABLY important in this game. People will completely ignore certain moves, spam others, and play completely differently than you expect. They'll also find incredible difficulty in simple things (Cyrus is a menace to people who don't know that you can block by... pressing literally nothing) or expect very different things than you'd think (my friends expected jumps to beat grabs since it's in most fighting games... unknown to me, the Smash-Tekken player). 

6) Depending on how you market your game, people can be a lot more forgiving of certain things

One of my best decisions was marketing the game as a solo-developed project. If I hadn't people would have compared me more to other games, but instead it becomes "oh, well, it was made by one person, so it's cool." Even if you can't say your project is solo-developed, wording your audience can help a lot too. The slow and simple gameplay titled "fighting game for beginners!" makes people go "oh, well, it's for beginners, so it makes sense that it looks like that." I expect a similar thing to happen if you label your game as difficult, so that people won't complain when they get exactly what they paid for!

7) For fighting games, people immediately attach to how cool it looks and how the characters look

Fighting games have to look cool! I may be an exception because I want my game to live up to people's "cutest fighting game I've ever seen," but I've had many comments of people saying they weren't interested because the game look too slow or unpolished. However, character appeal was another common comment I got! I'm sure I'm not the only one who will buy a fighting game based on 1-2 characters.

8) In fighting games, there will always be "that annoying character"

I thought everyone would love Plexie.

9) Fighting game balance still does not matter for 95% of people, as most people still have not realized how broken Draco is

OH OH OH THIS IS A GREAT ONE
I have only one friend who grinded DracoFighter with me to a point that he probably has nearly equal knowledge to me! And before the latest update, well, we figured out one big thing: the game's balance was AWFUL. Draco was an unholy nightmare whose airgrab could start and end in the same time Plexie's anti-air would come out. His divekick was a disjoint that could destroy anti-air projectiles, cross up the opponent, had a guaranteed followup, AND was safe on block. The funny part? NOBODY complained about Draco, and everybody thought Plexie was annoying and OP, despite being objectively awful. True balance doesn't matter to 95% of the playerbase!! You're free to balance the game around the 5%, but you should never ever worry about the balance too much in the early stages of development. Other factors like how fun the game is and the diversity of gameplay is much more important. 

10) Putting frame data values within matches helped literally nobody but me, even people that knew what they were

This is a very specific one. Since DracoFighter was a reconstruction, I tried out a few things that led into "oh, that's why they do that" moments. I thought it'd be interesting to include information that most fighting games hide, like hitbox sizes and frame data, but in the end they just felt like intrusive distracting meaningless elements. Communicating "I am plus on block" will probably be much more effective through things like character animation.

11) Not many people seem interested in having a community around a game, but a LOT of people are interested in getting questions/answers about your game

DracoFighter Discord dead, comment complaints are very alive

12) itch is a platform with kids that just want free website games

This one was maybe written a bit rudely, but I did not expect the rude comments on my itch page! I expected most itch users to be cool fellow gamedevs, but based on my comments, there's actually a large portion of the userbase that will find a free webgame and comment on it "add 100 more features or else this game is garbage" completely and totally unironically.

13) Friends are very very cool people who want to help you -- be nice to them

I have super cool friends that offered many times to help in so many different ways, but had to respectfully decline multiple ones for various reasons. Still, the times I did allow help did wonders for the project. Don't be afraid to get help when you need it.

14) Not using Git is pain

Please have some sort of version control system holy moly

15) Setting up different stores is pain (like Steam), setting up different builds is pain

Yup

16) Everything will always take about 3x longer than you expect 

Yup

17) Marketing is not half the work of the game (unless you want it to be), but its value might be about 2x the quality of your game

I have a friend who keeps saying "marketing is half the work in game development" but from my experience that's not actually true...? Sure, certain marketing campaigns will have millions of dollars put into them, but as a solo indie developer myself, making 1 video and ~10 images and ~3 announcements was nowhere NEAR the amount of work to sprite 30+ drawings for 4 characters, programming menus, 8 movesets, writing a story, creating enemy AI, etc. However, good marketing pays off EXTREMELY well, because as good as your game might be, it amounts to nothing if people don't actually know it exists, and there's a surprising amount of effort required to really reach out and make sure that people know your game exists. 

18) Making fighting game movesets is very, very fun

This was easily the most fun part of making DracoFighter. Having all the systems in place and just making a character that moves around well, has cool attacks that link into each other, and has everything working together perfectly. I love game design, and the secret characters are in DracoFighter purely due to my love for designing fighting game movesets. I really hope I can make a system for creating characters in DF2 so others can share the enjoyment.