Tic Tac Toe Postmortem

The project started as a way to get something done, to overcome procrastination, overengineering, overthinking, perfectionism and all in-between. And most importantly, get something done fully from start to finish.

What I could say what went right for the project is that I somehow actually finished the project fully and analysis paralysis disappeared for the time being. I improved on animation side a bit because I haven't used animation that much anywhere else before. Using creative skills and coming up quickly with compelling ideas was enjoyable and I felt I improved tiny bit on that side. Leaving intentional fun bugs in a finished version was an interesting outcome. Thinking in terms of making an actual game and not the surrounding tools or systems helped to be more productive, pragmatic, see the real issues instead of ones arising from the need of architectural perfection. Positively, there weren't any major roadblocks on programming or development side Additionally, I got a few cool new ideas like recording a video of yourself drawing to use as an animation in the game.

What went wrong is that at times I got distracted too much. Moreover, I realised that my development setup is not the best for quick development as I spent about 30 minutes trying to get Android exports working and installing it on my device. For some reason I decided to sync the apk file to my phone through Syncthing and install it instead of using adb more easily which in retrospect wasn't a good decision. Furthermore, my file explorer setup could be improved because it felt too overwhelming moving around the file system quickly. Fixing scaling issues and not using debugkey for signing were on the list of what I wanted to improve before finishing the project but they weren't strictly vital. In the moment it felt bad not fixing them but in retrospect it was a good decision because I would've spent too much time on solving scaling issues as my project from the ground up was based on 2D world components rather than scalable UI controls.

For the next time I want to figure out a way how to deal with different screen resolution on a 2D world, figure out a way how to record and include recordings of me drawing to include them as animations, clean up my file explorer setup and not forget to make an app icon and sign it with release key and perhaps, optionally, find a way to quickly combine short videos into a presentation video showcasing how the game looks and works for better engagement without needing to install the game.