Dev Log #4 Post-Production

In the last couple week of this semester, our actual game production had mostly finished. The final product now has three levels with three characters in it. In each level we will introduce some new financial knowledges to the player, provide with some challenges and hints as well. Things starts to slow down after the actual production has been finished. Since what's left is just presentation and postmortem report.

Many things have been cut from our original plan: we planned to have 5-6 levels with around 10-character max. But the actual time we have to make the game is way less than we thought plus we have other courses and assignments to do. In terms of financial literary, the original plan was to deliver messages or knowledges such as inflation, unemployment insurance, stock market, housing market and so on, but we realized that if we bring all these knowledges to the player the game will be boring and hard to with play with. Instead, we simplified the concepts we want to deliver and make the game more entertainment to engage with. Although the development process is hard but the actual product is good, we have a fully functional game with most of the function we planned implemented and majority of the contents and messages delivered.

 There are two things that I learned from this project; this first thing is that it is hard to make educational game. And as indie developers or small studios we need to avoid educational games at all costs. Not because it's hard to 'make it', but it is hard to make it educational and entertaining and profitable at the same time. Delivering meaningful messages in education games is important and right to do but as developer, we also need to admit that most player do not care, they are here to entertain, instead of reading and learning, they enjoy shooting, killing and gambling more. I learned this in a hard way through our playtesting. My friends are usually very happy to playtest my games but for this educational one, I have to beg them, kneel down, offer them a dinner to get them play it: they say good things about the content, but they will not play it at the first time. I feel like it is almost impossible to make money by creating educational games, and extremely high risk for small indie studio to do so.

The second thing I learned is the importance of motivation. A team only moves on if there is motivation. The motivation can be either extrinsic motivation or intrinsic motivation. If you got a job, you are paid to work on the project, so there should not be any complain. If you are working on something you really love and excite about, then there will be no complain as well. But if there are no such motivations from any of these types exist and people in the team only want to get rid of the project asap and move on in their life then that's it. This happens a lot in school projects.