So I’ve been working on this game, which was code-named “Cut & Paste” since January. It had some initial hangups because of technical details with XNA, and I eventually made the decision to move to Panda3D since the likelihood of actually making it on the Xbox 360 was slim and Panda does everything we need.
I finally decided to kill it (at least for now) so I could free my mind to explore other game designs. It felt like a heavy anchor in my mind and all creative ideas just simply stopped coming to me for other games.
Within days of putting the kibosh on the project, my mind was free and game ideas started flowing again – it was liberating!

So, because I like to learn from my mistakes, I’m writing up this postmortem.
With any good postmortem, you ask the hard hitting questions:

What went right?

The initial game design was pretty solid and sounded fun.
My team had regular meetings early on to flesh it out; motivation was high.
The migration to Panda made the art pipeline much easier and coding faster.
I wrote a sweet 2D sprite animation system for Panda which I might release under GPL open source license.
We have a pretty good 2D game framework built on top of Panda and XNA we could use for future projects.
The art style I thought up and fleshed out with my artist friend is solid, unique, and would be fantastic in a game.
The first pass using the art style for Level 1 was beautiful.
Using Google docs to collaborate our design documents.
What went wrong?
Two of the three team members had too many side projects and not enough spare time. I was often so burnout (I’m pretty sure that’s not a verb…oh well!) from making a game at work that I didn’t want to work on it when I got home. I bought a house and also had no time as I set it up for several months.
We failed to have regular meetings after the initial design was done. This killed motivation for all.
Choosing XNA from the start purely because we wanted to be able to sell it online for PC and on Xbox Live Arcade.
We should have focused less on art style and making money and made a quick prototype in Panda (as it is great for quick prototypes).
Our game relied heavily on a long, interesting story.
What could we have done better?
Team members MUST work on the game at least a few hours a week (myself included).
We need to have regular meetings to keep motivation up.
Don’t choose a platform solely due to the potential profit.
Prototype, prototype, prototype! Make a gameplay prototype earlier!
With such a small team, avoid epic stories.
Overall, I’d say I’m not very pleased with the results of this project. But I learned a lot of lessons, which is good because I can make sure to not repeat the mistakes in the next project. Who knows, perhaps Cut & Paste will rise from the grave and end up bringing enjoyment to millions. More likely, I will take what we built and the lessons learned and turn it into an even better project.