Hello folks! In light of the incredible support from Queer Games Bundle (we're nearing 500 downloads as of writing) I wanted to port across this Post-Mortem I wrote over on Cohost (give us a follow!). Hope you find it interesting - Cailín

back in early 2022 we were struggling or rather mostly me. reckoning with being trans also meant accepting a lot of other difficult things, we'd just cancelled our founding project (post-mortem/sneak peek some day) and sketching out the next one was going poorly. my difficulties at the time getting healthcare inspired a "nightmare game idea" and after losing a co-op member i thought it would be good to just make something. and SWHAP was born.

sketched out on two sides of A3 graph paper, and redone in digital format (can find links to that on cohost), this was the entire game. the goal was to have the design sorted right up top, important as Noah was busy finishing uni, and to do it in a month. like a jam game but a bit more relaxed bc everyone was volunteering. it was just important to have something out there made by us

and just in time came Trans Gal Jam 2022, exactly something it could into and with a deadline to meet...

personally, my biggest love is narrative design, but also want to be a good producer. it's satisfying and it fills an important role when you want to work with bigger teams. we'd tried and bounced off ClickUp (it has Margaret Thatcher quotes), i went back to Trello and kept things strictly to a single board. everything on one screen. all tasks were high-level, and checklists were abundant.

this strict limitation helped a bunch but definitely has some key flaws, mostly that its really rigid. if your game is small, thoroughly planned, and you stick to that plan, this is okay, but it's something i know just can't scale. it's also not great for handling priorities, due to how high-level each part is. and anything dynamic (i.e social media) is just a mess to track well.

the team was just 2/3rds of unseelie (Sparky and i), otherwise made up with friends and the first time i recruited via twitter (@MrMandolino <3). it was a spare-time project for everyone and, aside from a weekly stand-up, was strictly about how much people could offer.

handling production meant also covering design, art, tech, and audio direction all at once. i've done some SFX work prior, and done concept art with the same artist, but otherwise it was both daunting and stretching. without a designer meant quickly meeting with a programmer, breaking down an idea, and just going for it. working in a new engine (UE5) too this resulted in a lot of weird problems we had to try and solve like...

• bodies drop randomly, but secretly all the spaces are determined. we had to plan a final route to make sure the game wasn't made unplayable too quickly. changing the scale of the room/movement was deemed contrary to the game's tone (miserable waiting room).
• we didn't have a technical artist so we bought a shader for the visuals, except it didn't work for the UI! we made dialogue part of the game world and not UI to "fix" that, but it was too late for the waiting room UI.
• we never managed to replace the path visualisation, and it still has weird visual "glitches" like folding onto itself and layering the transparent black.
• the death system works somewhat as intended, but experimenting with how much we wanted the player to move and how long it should take to get through the queue meant we had to put our numbers on some really weird scales.

with our current, and any future project, i'm swearing by having a designer. it was great to get experience in triage but it'll be good to not have to rely on that so often. the most significant cut feature was queue interruptions, whereby other characters being dismissed from the line could have been used to demonstrate intersectional discrimination.

without that feature the game centres wholly on a white, transfeminine perspective because you never control someone else. the game will "kill" more marginalised characters more often, but i don't think the disparity is noticeable enough and i do consider it a failing of the game. without something like that it's only a "demonstrative experience", something i can share to cis people to communicate to my experiences but that can't prompt someone like me to reflect on how i might experience the healthcare system to someone else.

at the least, i was very happy with art direction. i've worked with daniel strachan a bunch at this point and our little process for producing briefs and gathering references, giving feedback to work, has been really nice. the biggest challenge was just Sparky being able to find time to animate in-between a full-time job.

audio direction i definitely felt i was very awkward with, not feeling confident with my feedback and being unsure about boundaries, really just worried about being frustrating or upsetting to work with. despite that, mando's work is really fantastic and i'm so happy they volunteered to join on, so i look forward to when audio is worked on with our current project so i can get better with that and the next person i work with.

the game featured my first public writing in years, as i'd long before convinced myself i was no good at it. there was very little time and translating very complicated medical situations to SMS-length dialogue wasn't easy. ultimately it felt very functional and serviceable to me, but i think it's fine given the dialogue encounters are meant to feel dismissive.

the most important thing is that i wrote something, got a spreadsheet and worked in docs to produce it. it makes me excited to work on things like twine and bitsy and to take on more creative, intimate dialogue on future projects.

i was really happy with the itch page, as i learnt a ton about how to theme them while still keeping it simple and accessible. i want to keep this up with all projects as it hopefully helps them stand out.

my goal for downloads was... 10. after 1 month we reached 100, and as of writing it's over 250. the reviews still sit at 9, but i'm genuinely stunned at the response. it probably helped our announcement tweet was RT'd by someone with 10Ks of followers, but otherwise my small WIP tweets all had just a modest response.

the biggest surprise was where our traffic came from. initially half came from twitter but after just a few days most of it was coming from itch itself, and mostly from the Transgender tag. i've talked before about problematic issues with that tag but i can't deny the power of finding a good niche. next project i'm excited to do a bit of commercialisation to help compensate some of our work.

(you'll get an updated version of this on cohost at the end of this month to show the incredible impact of Queer Games Bundle)

so, overall thoughts, extra bits & bobs? i'm genuinely really happy with it. we had to extend by 2 weeks and i made a bunch of mistakes, but because of that it's been an incredible learning experience that affirms my interest in game development.

i described it above as "demonstrative, not reflective" and i do think this is a failing. in future i want to explore "anti-fun" and challenge our contemporary, uncritical focus on "fun at all costs" but this being an experimenting in "unfun" i think shows it's not the best. it's interesting on paper, but in practice i think suffers in communicating its ideas.

my biggest surprise was how difficult people found it, i don't think i heard a single person had won. it's good then that we made sure failing had a cutscene and custom vfx, which we did when i was so sure no one would see it. and otherwise i'm so happy the distraction mechanics (i.e newspaper) got people distracted and failing the movement prompts. while i'm not satisfied with the intended design, that it played out as planned is really affirming.

and for today, i'll leave it there! sadly a lot has faded from memory, this is just a small slice of what happened, but i'll be sure to share more in future. if you liked this post please do check out the game, 5-star reviews help a ton, and share this post <3