Omnitris Postmortem

As I said on the game's page itself, Omnitris was a small project to test the systems of working together - the development environment, source control, packaging, and publishing. It was the first project I developed entirely on Linux, after jumping ship from Windows 11 about a year ago.

What went well

• The development environment was a bit of a pain to get set up, but it's set up now, and I documented the process.
• Forgejo allowed us to have our own private source repository with all the power of Codeberg, Github, or whatever else, without the risk of disclosing our code.
• Sourcing assets was really straightforward. No need to use generative AI: public domain art and audio is plentiful, people are literally begging you to use their hard work, and they don't even want to be credited for it.
• Godot's design tools were a bit tricky to get the hang of. But, get the hang of them we did.
• Itch.io's upload tool, Butler, was great. It was a piece of cake to build it into the export process.
• Getting our company website up and running was super easy. It turns out you never really forget how to do web dev. I did that all on my own. I tried the website builder the hosting company offers, but it didn't produce a very good website - it was laggy and bloated. I ended up coding it myself.

What didn't go well

• Our initial upload wasn't actually a functional game. We learned that we need to not only include the executable but also the data directory. Fortunately, Butler just does this by default, so it was super easy to upload a better version.
• Building for Windows was a pain in the kiester. It still is. But we managed to get there.
• The game is currently quarantined while Itch.io make sure we aren't trying to infect everyone's computers with a virus, which is fair enough. Hopefully they'll review the game over the next few days. I wish they'd be a bit more transparent about the process, but I understand why they aren't.

Some funny things that happened

• We learned we have a shared hatred of spurious precision. It's not version 1.0. It's version 1. The .0 doesn't belong there.
• At one point, we had a conversation in the "reason for close" field of an issue.