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Miscellaneous

A reflection I guess

Final (?) thoughts:

According to the laws of the internet I probably should have never posted this game, much less created it in the first place. I’ve seen reviews on rmn and other sites that (lovingly) mock “my first games”. The reasons are obvious, first games serve as a testing ground for new developers in all aspects, story , programming, art, sound gameplay ect and sometimes they’re complete disaster zones. Scaredy Cat is definitely a messy testing ground. For one until recently I’d never worked with digital art before. Also during the making of Scaredy Cat I ummm… didn’t have my tablet yet. Yup folks, you guessed it: retro is codeword for “no tablet”. Secondly I’m not that great at writing storylines, and Scaredy Cat is a weird clash of me trying to write about my neurotic fears about death and commitment while also trying to make the cutest game possible at the same time. Thirdly, I decided to make this BEFORE I found out about IGMC. By the time I found out about IGMC and decided to enter I had about two weeks. Yay deadlines. So the game is not the best, it’s simple and sweet and maybe naïve but its mine. And I’m very proud of it. So it’s online now, regardless of whether it should be or not.


But Ebeth, you ask, you said laws not law. Yes I did. It’s common knowledge in fiction writing that things you should generally avoid are your shitty oc’s from 8th grade and self insert characters. But to quote melon journey:






Simply put; Mia is me. Well sorta. So this game is awkwardly personal and autobiographical. One of my irl friends played Scaredy Cat and immediately picked up on this. Yeoch. But I viewed these two things as a challenge; could I take a trope that’s inherently bad and turn it into something decent? I like to think I did.


Obviously a lot of areas of the game could stand improvement. Namely the music. Also the storyline. Definitely the gameplay and puzzles. Hopefully these area’s will see improvement in my future games.
Now it’s “pat myself on the back time” because if there’s one thing I’m proud of it all the details within the town. I think I managed to avoid creating a boring town filled with zombie npc’s. There’s nothing that worries me more when I play video games than entering npc’s houses and seeing that everyone has the same bed, table and chairs. Good god! Are there no craftsmen or design students in these worlds? I could only customize so much given my time and (lack of) tablet restraints, but I like to think that each house had its own unique atmosphere. I’m also proud of my npc’s. Yay for diverse designs! Also the fact that people seem to be able to remember and refer to them by name is a good sign. The other good sign is that another one of my irl friends who played Scaredy Cat said that Erica (the witch) was his favorite character of the whole game! Now either that means I wrote a good npc or my mains were seriously lacking. (I’m hoping it’s the former.)


Lastly it’s very interesting to see different people’s interpretations of the game. Nhubi wrote a lovely review and I found it interesting that they picked up on a lot of symbolism that I didn’t actually intend. At least not consciously I guess. Oh well, I’m happy to take credit for it I suppose!


I imagine that now having completed everything necessary to the completion of this game I will probably never touch it again. There are definite areas for improvement within it but those mistakes will be learned from and kept in mind for future game making. Also I believe I managed to catch all spelling and bug errors (hooray for obsessive triple checking, my beta testers and nhubi!) so there will be no need for any re-do’s in that regard. Ahhh. I never thought I’d ever make a video game and now I’m considering majoring in game development. Life is weird huh?

-Ebeth
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