Hello and welcome to my little post mortem post about my project Lieblingsmensch!

I marked every section with headlines and you can feel free to skip a topic, if you wish so!

The Postmortem

This project was a bit different than the ones I did before.

First of all this project was more or less a proof of what I learned in the prior 2 years of game dev learning and a proof to show that I can make a game from scratch on the same level like my other games. My latest one did not get any direct support from my lecturers in the regard, that I did this all by myself (with the help of online sources of course) and only consulted them for feedback. 

And I gotta say it went out pretty well!

I did a more easy approach this time and orientated from my experiences and references and came up with something that did inherit my original vision. This vision was to make a more personal story I got in life playable in a way that may help me or others. A story that feels authentic and maybe relateable in some or all points to people.

Of course it is not a one to one translation from what I experienced in life and I did my best to keep situations in the game in a general manner. The rainbow figure is meant to be neutral, as well as one self and I hope the depiction of a new relationship, split into "Acts" was something pleasent to follow along.

Yet I want to give a bit of definition behind my thoughts while making this project and I will do so in another post and will probably talk about "My Intentions and Inspirations" next time -> The Inspiration And Trivia Of Lieblingsmensch

To give a bit insight on the procedure of making this concept of love at first sight into what we have here, let's talk about the difficulties I faced:

The Difficulties

Being a solo dev means you have to master the art of motivation and organization and to give you an example how that went you just have to take a look at my Instagram account, where I wanted to do a slim guide on how to game dev, but I could not get myself to do it after the first batch of stories, because I was drained from energy most of the time. I dragged myself with the sentence in mind, that "small steps will move you forward as well" and some days these small steps were taken literally than on other ones. There was a whole month, were I just did User Interface shenanigans, because the rest was so easy to just procrastinated on and UI was like so easy to get started after the groundwork was done. Just do a silly little canvas box, fill it with an image and BAM: you got the feel of progress because you can now click a button and it shows an image. Amazing.

These little "yay progression" kicks are sometimes just so needed to keep the head clear from thoughts of not making everything in time.

What I want to say is: I often felt lost and having one thing to focus on kept me afloat, yet you cannot run away from much needed tasks forever and you have to do the icky parts as well. To keep everything clean, you have to organize and I would lie if I say I used all the software I set up at the beginning through the end, heck I just used my block of paper and a pencil in the end and vibed with that. Everyone has a different method to that, but please for the love of everything, every solo project needs some way of organization, or you will get lost somewhere down the line.

I am still thankful to myself in the past for having a simple idea that did not involve much effort in 3D works, be it textures or modelling. I did a lot of sprite work, but that was something I could handle better, also because of my prior game "Clerk", where I used a similar technique.

But with that done, let's get to the actual game and all...

The Secrets

Normally I try to put some sort of reward for exploring my games and getting into the mechanics and such, but this time it was a bit more focus on completionist parts, because there are collectables, but they feel a bit in a weird spot.

- The Collectables make you slower, so you could collect them at difficult spots, to maneuver them more smoothly, but when you die, they do not respawn, they only do reappear after you reset the level, either with the level select function or the "retry level" in the finish screen.

Collect every collectable in a level and get their respective diary entries in the extras tab in the main menu!

- The Diary-Entries provide a bit of background of what happens to the protagonist and give a more definite story behind the messages and thoughts, written everywhere in the main game. Collect every diary entry to get something special!

- The Timer is a setting you can put on in the settings, but will be counted regardless and will be shown in the finish screen. You must finish a level to the end for your time to be saved in the extras "times" tab. Besides your time are my times displayed as well, to give you a little challenge to beat them. They are not particular optimized, but may use skips, that are not entirely obvious. Hope you enjoy it as a challenge, but sadly I did not come give a particular reward, if you beat my times besides the honor to outplay me!

- The ??? Button is something special you can unlock after you revealed all Diary entries and is a little special I hope you can enjoy to play around with. 

After that there are some little secrets I hid in the main level, but they are more funny bugs I just kept for it being fun

- You can make the entire level 1 in a dark setting, if you trigger the transition to dark theme and then return to the main level or end yourself before hitting the finish line. I added some light emitting unlit materials, so it is not impossible to navigate.

- You can do the same in level 3 with the first transition, but it is not as exciting though.

and with that I end this little post mortem / secrets section to my game Lieblingsmensch. Hope to see you next time!