Yep the title isn't lying (if you ignore all the times i was either busy with school, working on other projects or just being lazy and watching youtube all day.)

In this postmortem i'll talk a little bit about why this game took so long and how i finally found the motivation to finish it. buckle up, and if you're allergic to yapping i highly suggest you click off RIGHT NOW!!!

How it started

The epic origin story of this project is already on the gamepage itself but to keep it short. My first ever game made in gamemaker 8. that game is gonezo because i didn't backup my files, and wanting to remake it for nostalgic purposes.

Here i quickly made a graph showcasing how long this game has technically been in development lmaooo.

My main rule while starting development of the remake was to make it as faithfull to the old version as i could. This was by far my biggest mistake, cause i took that "faithfull as possible"  way to far. For example limiting the game to 30 fps like the old game for nostalgia's sake. I also based most of the sprites like the smiley, skulls and powerups on gamemaker 8 assets. Why didn't i just use said old assets? idk lol.

Around 2019 i was making all the game mechanics, the minigames and bosses. To my surprise the thing i struggled most with was making the levels. Probably because i thought to hard about it. and i also wasn't happy with the regular gameplay of the game. Eventually i lost my motivation/interest to work on it.

Why finish it?

Good question! for the longest time i was wondering that myself as well. To me it just wouldn't be worth it.  the game gets repetitive, it's too boring, I'd rather want to work on other projects, do i want people to play this over my other games?  is using game maker over unity even worth it?

I was contantly worrying what other people would think of the game.  but i was already so far into dev (like 80% done?) i mostly needed to make the rest of the levels and a ending/results screen. The game had minigames and boss fights already done, it would be a shame if all that work would've gone to waste. but i just couldn't find the motivation to work on the game. Why work on a game i'm not happy with when i can work on a game i do get that enjoyment out of?

sometime earlier this year i was showing a lot of my unfinished games and prototypes to my friend Belphegames and he really liked the smiles and told me why i didn't finish it? after i told him why he said to just make it for myself, as some sort of achievement. That really stuck to me. 

It also helped that another friend of mine, also worked on remaking his first ever game(check it out btw!). and seeing him keep working it also gave me some more motivation to finish my own ''first ever game'' remake

Now i just needed a excuse/deadline to finish it, and coincidentally i stumbled upon the finish your game jam, wich was a low stakes gamejam with the sole purpose to finish an existing game for a week. If i was ever going to finish this game it would be now. So i setup a trello board and got to work.

And? Was it worth it?

At the end of the day. I'm happy i still finished it. i'm happy people can play it if they decide to ignore all the 100s of antivirus messages (thanks microsoft) even tough i'm not really satisfied with the game, i'm still happy i did it for myself. 11 year old me would be proud :)

in all honesty I'm still thinking heavily about just switching engines, but i'll see if i can finish other projects before i make that leap.

Thank you for reading all of my rambling and yapping. i hope you too won't be too harsh on yourself. and just develop games, even if you think other people wouldn't like it.