We have reuploaded the build of Kin. It still has a lot of major bugs/kinks.

Notable ones:
-Script error upon loading a save
-Hitboxes...

Hirei's PostMortem

I seem to have a penchant for completing games in a month, however this time I had the chance to work with the wonderful radiostarkiller and shunao as well as several others on this project.

Some of this post-mortem might coincide with the others that have been already posted.

What went well:

Story: We had our story done early on and easily pounded out an outline within 3 days. The storyline was simple enough that it could be easily explained within a few minutes but had enough leeway to be expanded upon / have more development. It's definitely easier to make a story when you have a lot of other people to bounce ideas off of

Art: This is something I think we did VERY well on as the three main developers are mainly artists. We decided to split our work into roles: ex: level design and sprites. I decided to not take a prominent art role this time around since I had plenty of it while working on Reincarnation - Dawn of War - . This left me ample time to tackle something that I'm very weak at: eventing / handling of the prototype. With this said, our team did something very unique for portraits. We decided to collaborate on them. Radiostarkiller did all the sketches, Shunao did all of the lineart, and then I was the one to color them.

With the art direction, Shunao took the lead with selecting the color palates for the characters and levels. I think that this gave our game an edge with having a unique style. Radiostarkiller incorporated the colors into the levels and used them in tandem in order to create distinct styles for the house and the gameplay levels themselves. For the UI I decided to go with something very simple, so it was very easy to do.

I think that we really did our best with providing an amazing atmosphere. In terms of art, it's definitely something that we were the ston9est at.

Music: We managed to snag a musician with Shunao's help. She did an awesome job at providing the ambiance pieces as well as some key melodies in a very short amount of time. In all we had about seven pieces of custom music which was great.

What went wrong:

Overall the gameplay experience is very lackluster unfortunately. There was a bunch of story that we wanted to put in as well as lots of other features that didn't make it due to time restraints. We originally planned for a lot more interactivity and more expanded endings.

The level designs were initially a little difficult to deal with considering the fact that we forgot to account for enemy size and how high the character can actually jump. I also had a lot of difficulty dealing with the platforming system due to my general inexperience eventing/programming. Hitboxes were sometimes too large, or my programmed enemies sometimes ran too close to each other. There were also a lot of frustrating times when things would just simply break. As someone who is a complete newbie at the program, I had to ask miuofstars and another friend to help me beta test and figure out what exactly went wrong. I really appreciated them going through and breaking my game. Yes. I'm thankful for them breaking everything as it's helped me catch all the errors that I've missed. Unfortunately there are still some serious gamebreaking errors that is beyond my expertise. We hope to rectify them soon.

The bugs and general gameplay were so horrendous that we decided to pull out of the All Hallows competition that the team originally entered in. It's sad that we failed, but I think it's important to have failures as much as successes. I was tackling features meant to be handled by more experienced individuals, but I'd still like to improve all the same.

Working with this new team was absolutely amazing. We worked very well together and I'm still glad that we made Kin. It taught me about the importance of failure (my first two games were considered successes), eventing, and much more.

We aren't giving up though! We are planning on making a Kin v2.0 with numerous bugfixes and features that were missing from v1.0.