The Hookmarine postmortem

Hi everyone, I'm following the tradition of making a postmortem in every LD I participate, and with this I'm really excited.

First of all, THE GAME :)

Ok, this time I've livestreamed almost all the development of the game for the first time, and I really enjoyed it, a very nice experience.

As usual, I made a jam game because I'm from spain and I miss the first hours. On saturday morning, I started my stream without even an idea for the game. I had some ideas that didn't work for me, but after talking for a bit with my viewers I got an idea that I really liked: a submarine that has to remove toxic waste from the deeps of the sea.

The "hook" of the game is that you use a hook to move yourself and the toxic waste (yeah, pun intended). I got the movement and grab mechanic in a really short time, which is very nice because moving some circles and squares on the screen was really fun.

The game had originally a lot of mechanics, weight sistem, player health, score system... I got rid of everything because the main mechanic was really fun, and I wanted to improve that. The first day was basically that, make the movement as fun as possible.

When I got that, I started with the art, a while ago I made a little unfinished game with a submarine, so I decided to reuse the design of that. I used simple shapes to make every graphic on the game and then, off-stream, I made some modifications to the camera and added postprocessing.

That night tho I made a build for webgl and the performance was REALLY BAD. I spent two hours trying to fix it, but in the end I only had the hardware acceleration off on my browser :)

The sunday was basically "UX time". I made some menus and polished some elements of the game to make it more enjoyable. The stream was short but basically the game was done. The rest of the day I've tested the game to ensure there was no bugs and that everything worked fine.

I really enjoyed this project, making a game with a very small scope really helps to make it more polished, and the final result is just fantastic.

What went well
- Finished the game
- Nice graphics
- ONLY ONE MECHANIC
- Streamed most of the process and enjoyed it a lot

What went wrong
- Wasting two hours for a stupid thing

Tools
- Unity 2020
- Visual Studio 2019
- Clip Studio Paint

That's it, again you can play the game here and if you want you can watch my stream here, but it's in spanish :<

Thanks for reading :)