GrowthRPG Post Mortem

New update to the game was just pushed. It contains some small fixes, I may push another at the end of the month to fix some small bugs.

Here are a few of my short thoughts on GrowthRPG and the development process. Thanks to everyone that made this possible, I had a great time working on it.

What went right

The fact that the game exists at all. Theres very few growth games, especially 3d, and I’m glad I was able to work on this one and get as much done as I was able to, some people even have fun playing it. I hope there are many more to come in the future.

I like that I was able to try some of my dumb ideas. I had a lot of fun designing things like the antibodies and worldbuilding. The fact that there is a lake that is a big pawprint and the big body of water in the middle of the map is a big eye, the giant sword making a canyon and the albino gators living underground.

I am pretty proud of the character creator. I like that it's incredibly varied and for the most part seamless. It was fun having patron’s submitted characters in game too. I love that people made their fursonas using the game. It is something I want to focus on in the future by expanding it in the next project.

I like that the game was built in mind with no real limits. I think it's fun when you can get as big as the world if you were inclined, the only limits being what would crash your computer or when it would be rendered unplayable.

What went wrong

Combat overall is a bit of a mess. Especially concerning balancing, I had a lot of trouble with getting damage output to feel alright. I felt like a lot of my time was taken up by combat and not focused on the growth aspects of the game

The scale of the game was a bit too big. Making an open world RPG mostly by myself was probably a mistake. I wouldn’t even say it was feature creep either, there certainly are some mechanics that could be culled, but the basis of an open world RPG is already a huge ask.

The monthly update was a bit of a mistake. Earlier on it was fine but I think as the game grew people wouldn’t want to start over every single month, especially when I have the hotfix so its closer to every 3 weeks. I do feel like it helped keep the pressure on to motivate me, however towards the end it was more of a detriment as the game grew. Especially since the game getting bigger meant bugfixing would take longer, and it would be easier to miss something.

Coding practices, basic systems were setup improperly making them inconsistent and unstable. Unfortunately it caused a lot of bugs, made adding new content a struggle and overall the game was a lot less polished than I would have liked. I am positive I could rewrite the game to get rid of these errors now, but at that point I would be making a new game from the ground up. You sure do learn a lot in 5 years working on the same thing everyday, I am sure I have a lot more to learn too.

The sacrifice system could have used some more work/retooling. In general its a bit of a compromise to try and get growth to last a bit longer, since it was planned to top out around 1000 visually for most stats. And since this is a game you may spend quite a few hours in I didn’t want players to speed through it and have no place left to grow, but I think the system was unsatisfying at best and confusing at worst. Maybe there could have been a way to recontextualize it to feel better. It was something added fairly late into the dev cycle, I think next time the plan is to try out mechanics like this early to get feedback on them before trying to build the rest of the game.

Scripting especially for quests/dialog was a constant mess. Both from my dialog system having data loss and quests constantly breaking. I wish I could have done more sidequests and more for the main story but unfortunately, I have found scripting is not my strong suite. Which is a shame, I had a lot of fun ideas: running into more of the apothecary's former apprentices, the lich turning into a recurring boss that transforms more each time you meet them, a noble knight on a quest to find the largest butts, and a dungeon boss that was the person driving the nail into the roots.

In general, I wish I were able to put more content in the game, I still think it's a bit lacking, and the world is empty


What I learned

Having characters that can scale indefinitely is a giant pain. From things like culling, to camera placement, interactions, collisions, to even having them not fall through the floor is a gigantic challenge in its own right. It makes nearly everything harder because there's nothing you can assume for characters.

Next project updates will take a lot longer. For the next project I will be aiming for every 3 months while doing dev logs. A bit less pressure on me, and they would be proper sized updates for people to get excited about.

I do wish I had accepted more help from the community. The help I got was incredible with animations, environments, and icons. I do wish I had asked for more help with even the simple things, like releasing the files for texturing the body so I could crowdsource the patterns, or have someone help with dialog. I don’t think having someone help with code would have worked for this project, just because it was so messy, but definitely in the future I would be fine with hiring people to help.

I would like to have some dedicated playtesters next time, that way I don’t have to release the game, get bug reports, and then do the hotfix. I could have a few people play it before release, report back and then release that instead. And doing some automated testing for the next project too, but I think right now that might be beyond my skillset.

Next project is going to have more of a plan. I had a basic design doc when I started but I did basically whatever I felt like month to month. will have a more concrete plan with a set end goal and time. This was my first big project, so I wasn’t sure what to expect or how to plan it. I have a better idea now but game dev is always a bit of a tricky business.