Final Fharmacy Released! Dev Notes

Final Fharmacy I, my new game, is out! It took about 6 months to make it. By comparison, my first game, Balls to the Brawl, took me around a decade to make. Quite the improvement in productivity! Not quite at game jam levels, but hey, it's a step forward for me and I'm looking to make more and more.

It's a little bit of a departure from the typical kind of game I would think to make: beat-em-ups, shooters, you know, action stuff. But, for my first game in a new engine, I wanted to start with something that would be simple, especially in terms of the control scheme (mouse only). Besides, I do have a fondness for these management sim games like Cook, Serve, Delicious and Trauma Center, and thought I could embrace their fast-paced frenzy fun to still have a good modicum of action and skill-based play. Combine that with my fondness for alchemy and wanting to make turn-based battles more fun and strategic, and you've got Final Fharmacy I!

I gathered a lot of nice feedback from the initial release of the arcade demo on Pixel Day 2020 and I think it helped shaped it. The number one piece of feedback I got was the tutorial, in that it needed one in the first place, haha. Even though I review a bunch of games to ensure their tutorials are great, I do find myself constantly erring on the side of not wanting to baby the player with a bunch of instructions, and end up not having enough instruction at all. For this, I doubled up the tutorial by both having an initial instruction overview, and then pertinent instructions right at the time you need them to reinforce that.

This game is a lot of firsts for me:

First time working in a new engine: Unity. Still coming to terms with it but it's working quite well and I think I have a good flow now. It's not as easy to make artistic changes on the fly like I could with Flash: I miss being able to draw directly into the game.

First time working with another person (besides my family): Vincenti Zghra made some great chiptunes for the game that really captured the RPG battle feel I was going for! It was quite the challenge to get past my anxiety to contact them, but I'm so glad I did as I think the music turned out amazing for the game and I feel like I've now improved myself by getting more comfortable communicating and collaborating!

First time constraining myself effectively: unlike Balls to the Brawl, where I was way over-ambitious and kept adding all sorts of stuff to it constantly, Final Fharmacy had a solid and minimal design concept that worked out well. There were only a few slight deviations during the work process, and it wasn't an issue since the code was written in a way that it was easily modifiable to accommodate for that.

For my next game, I'm planning on stepping up the complexity bit-by-bit. This one was a rather simple mouse game. Next, I might keep it as a mouse-based game, but have the mouse actually control a player moving around and shooting, perhaps like a Space Harrier or Wild Guns type game, so I can get some player animation practice. Then I'd want to make a game where you actually move a character around, perhaps top-down or side-scrolling, like a Contra or Metroid game. After that, I think I would be able to move to my ideal world, which would be something like a beat-em-up or character-action game like Streets of Rage and Devil May Cry. I don't want to make the same mistake I made with Balls to the Brawl which had wayyyy too many moving parts and complexities for a first game, but I do want to make a game like it again eventually by combining experience I get from games I make beforehand.