2024 Lessons Learned + Going Forward

2024 was a year of a lot of ups and downs for me. The project progressed more than it has in years and I got a promotion at my job, but this came along with me burning out pretty badly in the last quarter of the year as my country backslid into fascism. It’s a dark world we live in but I guess that makes for decent creative fuel for a game about surviving a post apocalyptic hellworld.

This post is gonna be a bit of a ramble but I’m hoping it lets me make a mental breakthrough to start writing more. I’m gonna be brutally honest here and just say I’ve let this page give me far more anxiety than it should ever have. I think as Inhuman’s main work has become more and more focused on content, I became less confident on finding anything interesting to say about it here. It’s not really the place to show off how pretty it is (which isn’t really my work) and I don’t wanna spoil every little bit of level design that I’m doing. But that excuse only goes so far, so I wanna make this year a much better one for me when it comes to posting things here. 

The State of Inhuman

2024 was a really good year for Inhuman. We went from constantly chasing our tails, working on the same content repeatedly and undoing lots of hard work, to establishing clear goals for what we want from each section of the game and working to lock down content every month. Currently we’re in a grind to get the game to a state I would call the minimum deliverable project we’d be happy with. I’d say there’s about 90 minutes of solid gameplay in the current build, give or take on your play speed and skill, and there’s room for a good chunk more. 

What I’m basically hoping to do is just get everything presentable first, so that means proper story scenes, no areas with severely lacking art, and all our major gameplay beats locked down. If we’re still motivated from there then we can keep going, but until then, I’m extremely focused on avoiding scope creep. Having a game that felt too big to finish severely dragged down progress in 2023, so keeping a clear light at the end of the tunnel in view is a must at this point.

Working To Ship

Keeping myself on track and avoiding further ballooning of the game’s scope has largely come from working on a playtest to playtest basis. I plot out how much work I could do given about 2-3 weeks to get it presentable, then try to guess what I could do in the next builds from there until I’ve got a decent roadmap for the next few months of work. We have soft deadlines, but the important thing is just understanding how much work is actually left rather than just having a nebulous list of stuff we’d like to have.

April was my working month to hopefully have the game at a state where all our major content was done and all that was really left was polish, and I’d say we almost made that goal. My professional work + taking my first vacation in a decade has made that a lot less likely, but I think we’ve kept on track whenever I did have time to work on the game. 

This is a process I really wanna write down and publish in a more formal article as I think it’s the single best thing to happen to me as a developer. I find that indie/hobbyist developers tend to view their time as “unlimited”, with no worries about looming deadlines sullying their work being perfect. But the reality is this: You have limited time. When we imagine what our projects might look like with more time and resources, we fail to see the trade offs we’re making.

Time

Time is a resource, but it also has a quality of its own. If you work on a project long enough, the time spent will start to have an effect on it. You’ll change as a person, priorities might shift, your new work will start to make the old work “look bad”, etc. All of these things will give you excuses to start going back and redoing code, expanding your levels, doing extra art passes, and never actually working towards a game you can release. 

As long as you work this way your project is never going to be what you want it to be. How could it be? Your view of it is constantly going to be changing, and you’ll always be seeing what could be better rather than what needs doing. This is basically what has made Inhuman take the better part of a decade of my life and honestly I kinda regret it. I’m proud of the game I have now for sure, but I really wish I shipped more up to this point as I seriously believe I’d have gained a lot more from the experience. 

Failing Faster

“Fail faster” is a mantra I’ve come to really live by in the last 8 months or so. The idea is basically this: If you’re willing to see something through to the end quickly, you’re going to improve much faster as you rapidly learn from mistakes. Whether it be level design, writing, art, whatever, you’re doomed to fail. We all are! Nothing we do is perfect and anything we put out as finished is going to bare all our flaws, but that gives us something to improve on in our next project.

This mentality is basically what is driving my process of working for each playtest build. I’ve become far more comfortable putting out work I’m not certain on and subjecting my poor playtesters to testing it out. I’ve improved our outright cut content so much faster than I ever did in the past and the game has basically doubled in size thanks to this process. At some point this is going to lead me to a game I can call “finished” and then I’ll put it out and learn from all the mistakes made during that process too. 

The Future

You might have noticed we got on Steam without me making any big media post on our ModDB, and honestly that’s just symptomatic of the bad mindset I’ve started to have about promoting the project. Something about talking to the public about it just got tiring for me and I’m sure it makes the game look like it’s dying or barely being worked on.

I’ve been putting a lot of thought into what I wanna do with this Patreon as Inhuman becomes less and less interesting for me to talk about. I think I’ve narrowed it down to basically 3 major things:

• Breakdowns of what I’m learning from playtesting

• More generalized articles on game design

• Critiques of games I care about

This page’s brand is still really centered on it being tied to a Half-Life 2 mod and honestly I’ve gotta get away from that if I’m really going to make this something worth subscribing to. I’m hoping in doing this, it also makes it a bit easier for me to just put out any random thing, both for this page and media promoting Inhuman as well. I really appreciate everyone who has stuck around following my work and I hope I can show it in my work this year.

Thanks for reading,

-Bradley