Pencil Plus: A Postmortem

As I sit here in my apartment reflecting on my experience working on Pencil Plus, I cannot help but be happy. We did it. We made a game and released it on Steam. This is especially remarkable because I came up with the original pitch for this game, and recruited the team to make it all happen. I could not be more grateful to everyone that helped contribute to the project. 

Officially, development on Pencil Plus began exactly three years ago to the day when Super Drop released on itch.io. I had the idea and pitched it to Alex, my business partner and programmer. He was all about it and very excited for it. I began writing the script, asked some of my artists friends to join the project, and things got under way. At this point, I would love to recall the entire development story chronologically. However, I will focus this postmortem on three specific lessons learned during the game's development.

1. Accountability is key

For better or for worse, everyone that I got to work on this project with me was a friend of mine. This came with both advantages and disadvantages. It was advantageous because I already had a good relationship with everyone, it was much easier to talk about my vision for the project. Everybody knew exactly what they needed to do. What friendship made difficult was making sure that everyone did their work in a timely manner. Out of fear of damaging our friendships, I tended to be much less aggressive with following up on the teams' tasks and commitments. On top of that I emphasized that this game was meant to be a side project for everyone and that it should not have ruled their lives while they were working on it. Things progressed fairly slowly for the most part. I soon realized that it was important for me to continually follow up with my team members regardless of our relationship. I had to be annoying for them to get their work done in a more decent amount of time. Once I did this, things picked up and the project marched along quicker.

2. Smart and steady finishes the race 

Perhaps the most important lesson I learned from this project is that consistent and steady work is what is most important for making a video game. Of course, there were times in which I would work on the game more than others, but I never gave up. Three years is a long time for an interactive visual novel that's only 45 minutes long. It would have been very easy to quit at any point during the project, but I never did. Even when I realized that I needed to rewrite the entire script in the second person, I didn't quit. I also love the title of this lesson, "smart and steady finishes the race." Making video games is not about winning. It is not about being better than anyone else. All the matters is finishing. Being smart, and working steady is what allowed me and my team to finish Pencil Plus. I will be sure to focus on this in any other projects I work on.

3. Killing Feature Creep

The bane of indie developers is feature creep. It is so extremely easy to give in to. Six or seven months into the project, I began to have visions of the game featuring 2D platforming and combat to mix things up. It would only be a few levels and would feature a boss battle. I had the levels drawn out and the perfect boss battle planned out. We quickly got a prototype together and started thinking about how we would make assets for these sequences, and I quickly drew them out. Soon this became my primary focus beyond writing the script and following up with the rest of the team. I do not remember exactly when, but at some point, I realized that if I actually wanted the project to be completed in a timely manner, we needed to drop the 2D platforming and focus on the interactive visual novel elements. This decision saved the project. We definitely would not be releasing tomorrow had I given in to the feature creep. From that point on I said no to pretty much every nonvisual novel idea that came up from the team. The vision was set and the game needed to be made. Here we are.

Conclusion

There are many more little things that I learned while working on this project. The most important one to me though is that I can do this. I can make video games. Not only can I make the, but I can publish them. At this point in my life, I am an independent game developer, and nobody can ever take that away from me. Whether I get a job after I graduate in a couple of months or not, I'm going to continue making video games, and it is a wonderful feeling knowing that I can.

 Written March 27th, 2023, by Ryan Abney