Post-Mortem

Welcome, wary blog reader! You have stumbled upon my personal journal of notes related to game development. Here I will share inside information into my experiences as a hobbyist game developer, programming tips and practices that I employ, as well as miscellaneous and slightly off-topic tidbits and links.

As this is my first post, I find myself in need of explaining my purpose for writing this blog. I am in no dearth of responsibility during my day-to-day, so adding this on top of it is likely not wise. There is a very good reason for it nonetheless. I feel the need to keep this blog as a means of creating a project-wide post-mortem.

Yes, this is against the very definition of post-mortem. Post-mortem is a practice of divulging information about a project and the process for the sake of examining it post-release. Why, then, do I find the need to conduct post-mortem across the pipeline? It is for the very simple reason that there is a lack of documentation and reflection within many indie dev spheres that I wanted to address... and I am no exception.

For those who have not read a post-mortem, see link here: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/postmortem/ It is typically the case that post-mortems will focus less on anecdotals of the past and more on present and future direction. While I cannot blame them, what purpose does a post-mortem play if you are already done with refining the process? In this new age of continuous delivery where even 2D nostalgia-ware games update their game regularly (as more than just bug-fixes) we should think toward all creating a post-mortem for games in progress.

It is my hope that this blog will become such a medium for myself, and a useful and enjoyable outleft for others.

-stencil chris