It's rather a postmortem than launch notes.

I'm bad at passing information in an organized and intersting way, so lets just start from the begining.

I've started making this game about 7 months ago as a free time project. My previous game was made in Unreal Engine in 99% blueprints, and this time I wanted to try making a game in c++.

I  had just a bit of experience in programing (writing code) before, mostly from school and few little projects at my job. At first making game in unreal engine in c++ was kinda scary, I didn't understand 80% of the stuff that was there. I recognized some functions, but didn't understand their structure. I was able to guess what an how some code was doing, but I didn't knew why it has been done this way. Other things looked just like compleate gibrish. 

All this dread didn't last very long, as just after few days of tutorials most of the above mentioned secrets stopped being so secret. Slowly, step by step I started making improvements, the biggest one was discovering Unreal Engine C++ API and Unreal Engine's Github, where I could search for some stuff like function's structure, how function overrites are implemented in UE source code.

As I learned more and more I started seeing the weekness of the code which I wrote before. Unfortunately life isn't perfect and so am I. If the code wasn't fatal I just left it untouched. I came to conclusion "after all it was working, and what's working is working, why bother how it does things".  

As I later found out that kind of thinking isn't great, when after you already implemented most of the stuff into your game, when you are just playing around with your creation and something goes wrong. After some investigation when you find out that the code which is implemented in 80% of your objects is simply not working as intended and you have to fix every single object manualy and make the new code compatible with all the connections with other objects which you were making all this time can bring you down quite badly. That's how I decided to take one month break, and work only on the project when I felt like it (which haven't happend that many times).

Around two months ago most of the technical stuff was already done. Up until that point I was just making some temporary graphics just to know what's what. For me this meant only one thing, making graphics and sound for the rest of development of this game. I'm not even decent at graphic and sound design, nor is it something which I want to do for more then an hour a day, so as you can imagine this stage of production wasn't very productive. Most of those days looked like this: get back from work, laze about, try making something for an hour, laze about for the rest of the day. About that time the session at my university has started, which made things only worse.

Those last two months have been very unproductive. All of the thing which I have done in this peroid would take around two weeks of work in my normal pace and work hours. If only I have been making graphics and sound together with the code ...

Just a few days ago in 5 hours I've made the itch.io page for the game with screenshots and video. All this time I've been pushing through with the development, but the closer I'm to releasing the game the less I care about it. Sometimes the only thing that keeps me moving is the thought of abandoning an unfinished project (which means becoming a real indie dev :) as some people would say).

During this project I've certainly learned a lot of things, most of which I will forget (if I haven't already), but for sure if and when I will be making another game I will try to remind myself what went wrong during this project, and what should I do. 

Few month of work for this? 

Thank, you but next time I will try to make something way simpler, to focus on the things that matter and keep motivation a bit longer.