A Postmortem For Everyone's Favorite Sorting System [Spoilers]

So, I guess you're here because you're interested in reading about how this game came into being, what went wrong, and what I'll do better next time. In that case, you're in luck. So, I'll start from the 'why', and then I'll work from there.

Why did I make this game?

So, unlike pretty much all of my other games, this game was designed to have a point behind it.

Basically, I made this game to vent about the whole 'gender binary' and 'assigning genders at birth' system society uses, by highlighting the fundamental flaws of it (mainly the 'overlooking the fact that intersex people exist', 'refusing to consider the possibility that people don't identify as the gender they were assigned due to their genitals', and the 'refusing to consider that there might be people who don't neatly fit into these two defined genders' problems).

Why?

Well, I'm trans, I don't identify within the gender binary, but the whole gender binary system (that society refuses to acknowledge as flawed) pretty much screws me over. It's bad enough trying to get onto a waiting list to be referred to one of the clinics that can actually do trans healthcare (seeing as the waiting lists tend to last for years), then, to be allowed to transition, I need to officially 'live' as my preferred gender for two years before being able to legally change my gender (but, of course, I'd still legally be male when trying to do that, which is pretty much setting us up for failure), there's no promise that I'd be able to get HRT or anything like that, and, at the end of the day, I'd be going from one label that doesn't fit to another label that also doesn't fit, seeing as the UK refuses to accept that other genders besides 'male' and 'female' exist. Additionally, seeing as the current 'Equalities' Minister in this country is literally a transphobe, I don't have much hope in my chances of being able to transition, and I guess that I'll probably be stuck as a gender I don't identify as for the rest of my life. Things also don't look good in terms of intersex rights (or, I guess, 'lack of') in this country, so I figured that I may as well address that as well whilst I was at it.

And, well, what better way to point out the obvious flaws in a system, than putting these flaws right in front of someone who probably still thinks that the system is perfectly functional?

So yeah, that's basically why I made this game: to vent about this system, and to make the flaws of this system pretty darn obvious to everyone who still hasn't realized that it sucks.

Designing the game

So, I first came up with the idea for this game shortly after I finished making 'The Button Factory' (I think it was like on the 1st of July), kinda by accident. Basically, I was thinking about WarioWare, and I guess I basically thought about taking one of the boss 'microgames' from it to it's logical extreme, and then I kinda realized that it kinda encapsulated a lot of the problems/thoughts regarding gender I've spent a lot of time repressing (mainly due to my inability to find the words to not repress them), but, at the same time, it wasn't something that was out of my league in terms of implementation complexity, and I figured that this project probably didn't belong on the back burner. Later on that day, I noticed the 'Trans Jam' advertised on this website's 'Jams' page, noticed that it started on the 10th of July, so I figured that it was a decent enough excuse for me to try making this game. Of course, keeping with the sprit of game jams, I decided to put it on pause until the jam started (because, y'know, it's generally considered rude to start work on a game jam game before the game jam even starts).

Anywho, whilst I'm on the subject of design, I'll go over some of the thinking behind some of the key design choices:

• There's 40 circles to sort because, when using a 600*800 resolution, and 64*64 circles, only 40 circles can neatly fit into a single side of the screen, so I just used 40 circles so it wouldn't be awkward if they were all sorted into pink/blue.
• There's no high score stuff, as this game isn't about 'sorting circles correctly' (which a high score system would incentivize). Instead, it's about 'This entire system is literally unusable' (and the inability to sort them correctly is a part of this).
• The pink/blue circles that don't change colour represent cis people who identify within the gender binary. The yellow circles represent intersex people (whose very existence points out a major oversight in the gender binary). The circles that 'change colour' represent trans people. They are implemented with an 'overlay' circle above the hidden true colour circle, and this overlay (representing their assigned gender) fades out over time to reveal their actual colour (representing them ditching their assigned gender and embracing their actual gender/transitioning), because trans people are actually the gender they identify as, not the gender they were assigned to at birth. Finally, the purple circles (they always transition from an initially pink/blue appearance) represent non-binary individuals (and others who basically identify outside of the gender binary).
• The circles that transition always start transitioning some time after you've sorted them, to mirror how society assigns genders at birth, without giving the individual any real opportunity to object (or any opportunity to rectify the mistake, mirrored by how you can't re-sort a circle you've already sorted)
• The bit at the end when your performance is 'marked' is pretty much assessed based on how actually correct you were, not on how 'correct' you were following the very limited perspective of the gender binary system. Basically, you're always marked as incorrect for yellow/purple circles (as being intersex/non-binary is outside the scope of the gender binary), and, for the pink/blue circles, you're only marked as correct if it's actually pink/blue in the pink/blue area (so, if it was originally blue but is actually pink (representing a MtF person), but you put it in blue, it's wrong, but if you put it in pink, it's right). Also, if any circles are still 'transitioning' during this time, they pretty much skip to the end of the process for purposes of saving time. But yeah, this segment at the end is intended more as a 'how wrong you were' than a 'how right you were'.
• The *toooootally* accurate instructional text for the first few circles is intended to highlight how the gender binary/assigning genders at birth system conflicts with reality: it insists that there is only pink/blue whilst a yellow circle appears, and insists that objects remain their initial colour when two objects which don't do that appear. This is pretty much intended to make the limitations of the system very obvious to the player very early on. (However, the remaining 35 circles are always randomized).
• The single-button control scheme is intended to pretty much highlight the (over-)simplicity of the gender binary/assigning genders at birth system.
• The kazoo music is pretty much because that's the only instrument I can play (well, besides 'bad acapella', if that counts as an instrument).

Anywho, with the main design choices explained, I'll now go over the process of making the game itself.

Making the game itself

I'll address the elephant in the room now: Yes, I kinda missed the start date of the game jam, and wasted the 10th of July finishing off the postmortem for 'The Button Factory' instead of starting work on this game. I also forgot to take my ADD meds over the weekend (the 11th and 12th), so I kinda didn't get around to starting work until Monday the 13th. But, I guess I'll go over how the process of development went.

Monday (13/7): Preliminary work (setting up objects and such)

So, similar to how The Button Factory started, I kinda only got down to buisness on the afternoon, after going into town after lunch to collect some prescriptions. Don't ask me why the last couple of games I've made have started like that, I don't know why either. But, point is, I kinda procrastinated all morning, but I had the afternoon to get work done.

So, that afternoon, I pretty much started from the 'engine'  (if that's the right term) I had used for The Button Factory, gutted most of the game logic from it, and I spent the afternoon pretty much writing the game objects (these being the circles that are being sorted, the 'sorter' conveyor belt thing, and the rectangles which are the 'areas' that the objects get sorted into). So, the design I came up with was a pretty simple one, so I had a good idea as to what exactly each object would need to do (and how they would interact within the main game loop), so, by Monday evening, I had pretty much all of the logic for these objects done. However, I currently didn't have a way of testing them, and I would need to make the game logic in order to properly 'test' them out, but, from a theoretical standpoint, these objects all appeared like they would work.

The only sprites I needed for the implementation would be the sprites for the 'sorter' object, as well as the X/ticks that appear over the sorted circle objects during the 'marking' phase (with everything else either being a primitive Java2D shape, or a string rendered via the Java2D.drawString() method), so I didn't need to worry much about sprites, which was nice.

However, the game was still pretty darn 'theoretical' at the end of Monday.

Tuesday (14/7): Actually getting the game logic done

So, on Tuesday, I didn't procrastinate, and got straight to work on the main game logic stuff, and I pretty much spent all of Tuesday working on it. It took a bit longer than I anticipated (despite the logic needed appearing rather simple at first), and, at around dinner time on Tuesday evening, I finally got the game logic fully implemented, and testable. However, there was a *slight* problem. Basically, the circles were to be sent left to the blue area if the sorter was blue, and right to pink if the sorter was pink. However, the blue setting was sending them to the right, and the pink setting pretty much made them continue going down. I kinda had to stop for food, so I had this problem looming over me whilst I was eating my dinner.

However, when I got back to it, after some looking around the code trying to find the cause of the problem, I found out what the problem was: I had initialised two constants (basically for pre-defining certain angles in radians) incorrectly. All I had to do then was just initialize them to the correct values instead, and then, the game was working as intended.

Here's how it looked at the end of Tuesday:

As you can see, it was definitely starting to resemble a somewhat finished product.

Wednesday (15/7): Planning and polishing

So, on Wednesday morning, we were visiting my granddad again, so I took the car journey there and back as an opportunity to get stuff planned out, so I could then implement it that afternoon. Among the things I managed to get planned out were the 'super helpful informative tips' that appear for the first few circles (along with how I could ensure the first few circles could be guaranteed to be certain types of circle, for artistic purposes), logic for making the sorter use animated spritesheets instead of a couple of static sprites, what sound effects I needed, logic for using music loops, and how the title screen would work.

So, with that stuff all planned out, I got to work on some of the improvements.

I managed to get the title screen working, got the sorter to use a spritesheet instead (albeit placeholders instead of the final sprites), added the 'Super Helpful Informative Tips' to the game loop, and generally made the game more presentable. All that was missing was the audio, and a non-placeholder spritesheet for the sorter object.

Here's how it looked at the end of Wednesday:

So, besides the sorter still looking very placeholder-y, the title screen missing a couple of strings, and the lack of sound, the game was pretty much done at the end of Wednesday. All I needed to get done on Thursday were the last few bits of polish.

Thursday (16/7): Finishing it up basically

So, Thursday's tasks seemed pretty simple: record audio, implement it, make spritesheets, replace the placeholders, finish credits, and then publish it. I initially thought I'd be able to get it all done by mid-afternoon. I was wrong.

The sound effects took me pretty much the entire morning to do, and, just as I got the last one implemented, it was already lunchtime. This didn't look very good. After lunch, I started on recording some music. I was somewhat inspired by the 'Wii Dancing' tune from Warioware: Smooth Moves, and, due to the slight filesize issues I had with my last project's audio, I thought that it would be a good idea to pretty much have layered audio tracks for the music, with layers starting/stopping depending on how far the player was in the game (like some basic dynamic soundtrack stuff). I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time, but, in hindsight, I guess the rather terrible music kinda detracted from the whole experience. Anywho, by the time that was recorded and implemented, it was already mid-afternoon, and the rest of the afternoon was spent making the spritesheets for the sorter object (getting those finally finished just before dinner time).

After dinner, I spent the evening finishing off the credits text stuff, before compiling it as a .jar, wrapping the .jar as a .exe, taking screenshots for the game page, before finally getting it uploaded at roughly 8pm.

I am a bit disappointed in my rather slow work on Thursday, but I guess that might have been partially because Thursday was mostly spent with assets, and partially because of burnout.

But, I still managed to get it done and uploaded in advance of the jam deadline, and that's the important thing.

Assessing my performance

Reflecting on the goals I set in the postmortem for my previous project

• Ensure my push sizes are definitely below 100mb before committing the files to my git repo
  • I managed to achieve this goal (although, the entire folder with all the game code/assets/WIP images/etc is below 100mb anyway), so this was a success.
• Mix any recorded .wav files down from stereo to mono (so less space is wasted)
  • I remembered to do this when saving my recordings, so this was also a success
• Stop procrastinating
  • I still need to work on this (as I did waste the first few days of the jam by not working on the game, and I did waste the entire morning of the day when I actually started work on the game), but I managed to avoid procrastination once I managed to actually start working on the game.
• Write postmortems sooner, not later
  • I posted the game last thursday (16/7), and it's currently wednesday (22/7), so it hasn't even been a week since I posted the game. However, the postmortem for The Button Factory was written about two weeks after I finished it, so I'd say that I've definitely met that goal. Additionally, I'd say that it's been a bit easier to remember what I'm writing about this time (as it's been less time since I actually did the things), so I'd say this has definitely helped.
• Make the postmortem a bit more professional (saving the colourful language for the source code/comments documenting my declining sanity)

  • (This wasn't one of the things from my last postmortem, but I guess it's like a meta thing from hindsight of that postmortem) I'd say that this postmortem is probably somewhat more presentable than the last one (with better formatting, less colourful language, including a few pics of the WIP stuff), so I guess I've made an improvement in this regard
    

Goals for next time

• Use less gratituous sound
  • If the thing doesn't need music/if the music I can produce detracts from the experience, I should refrain from including it (less is more and all that)
• Make something a bit more complex
  • I guess that this is probably the most simple game I've made (considering that it only uses a single button), so I probably should try to push myself a bit more with my next game, to develop my technical skills.
• Use more sprites instead of relying almost entirely on primitive shapes
  • I should try to experiment more with sprites, seeing as my use of primitive shapes probably does constrain me to very high-level/abstract game concepts (instead of games that don't require much imagination on behalf of the player to make sense), and I guess sprites might look more attractive to the average player
• Try to make another game with a point behind it
  • I'd say that this game has been somewhat successful in trying to make its point (at very least, nobody's started complaining due to them misinterpeting it), and there are a bunch of things I kinda find it hard to find the words for, but I think I can express via  the medium of videogames, which I could probably use as inspiration for future projects. I guess that I can't guarantee that my next game will have a point behind it, but I feel that I should try to have a purpose behind my art.
• Put a bit more thought into my titles
  • I guess that I probably should have replaced the 'Sorting' in the game name with 'Categorization' (as I guess that the whole gender binary/assigning genders at birth malarkey is more of a categorization system than a sorting system), so, next time, I'll try to make sure the title's more coherent, so I don't find myself in this somewhat awkward situation again.
• Plan out my next postmortem a bit more before writing it
  • In all honesty, this postmortem could have been planned out/drafted a bit better than it actually was, so, next time, I'll aim to plan it out properly before writing it, so it's a bit more coherent.