Postmortem

As I mentioned in the devlog, I went into this project feeling pretty burnt out from other things happening during the school semester. Between deadlines and personal life, I didn’t really have the energy left over for something overly ambitious or complicated. Because of that, I decided to go with something simpler and a lot more silly this time around— something that would still be fun to play, but wouldn't add too much extra stress.

Since I had recently been thinking about buying a kalimba, I thought it might be fun to make a digital version instead. It seemed like a cool way to explore both music and game design, and the best part was that it wouldn’t cost a dime! However, I didn’t want to just make a one-to-one recreation of a kalimba. That felt a little too straightforward, and I wanted to put my own personal spin on it. So I came up with the idea of replacing the kalimba’s notes with my own voice, singing each tone instead of having a traditional instrument sound!

That idea, combined with my love for tiny, squishy, cute things, led me to create a “frog choir.” Each frog would represent a different note, and when you interacted with them, they would croak (or sing) their note. It was very reminiscent of an old game I played called sky: children of the light, yet fresh and a lot more catered to my tastes which would definitely keep me motivated throughout the project.

In my last game project, I realized that I wasn’t the biggest fan of the UI aspect of game-making. I found it frustrating and confusing at times. Because of that, I decided to make UI design the main focus of this project in order to better familiarize myself with it. The goal was to make the game look….passable in as many screens and aspect ratios as possible. After some research, I learned that 1920 x 1080p was the most common screen resolution, so I focused primarily on optimizing for that size while making sure that it was still functional on other screen sizes.

This time around, I also discovered how useful containers can be. They helped me keep all the frogs neatly aligned with each other, which made the layout much easier to manage. I also learned about anchors, which allowed the side buttons to stay properly spaced from the edges of the screen no matter what resolution I used. To top it off, the “Scale with Screen Size” setting in the Canvas Scaler component became a lifesaver—it ensured that everything stayed proportionate and visually consistent across all aspect ratios.

Audio design was another huge part of this project. Configuring the frog croaks was something entirely new for me, and I ended up spending a lot of time experimenting in Adobe Audition. It was incredibly helpful for filtering and cutting the sounds until they sounded just right. However, if I were to do it again, I’d probably centralize the audio system instead of giving each frog its own audio source, since that setup quickly got messy.

In the end, though, I’m genuinely proud of what I made. The final game made me laugh, and I found myself playing it over and over just for fun. I met all of my goals, learned a lot, and created something that truly reflected my personality. If I had more time, I’d definitely add more features—but even as it is, I’m really happy with how it turned out.