Thank you! This took me long time. Roughly 2.5 years. I started slow and part time, working on it once in a while. Then I eventually decided to work on it every day, just do something every day. I realized progress was too slow and I set daily commit goals. Towards the end of the project it was close to full time.
I made a lot of implementation mistakes early on which I think slowed me down. But I learned a lot. The process of getting a game on steam, running a playtest. It was a great learning project. I want to continue making games, but I think I'm going to try for much smaller scope on the next one. I'm going to continue supporting this one for a while and adding some more content, and some of the nice to haves I didn't have on launch day.
I made the game in Unity/C#. I started using paint.net but later switched to aseprite for pixel art, esp animations. Audacity for audio editing. Davinci Resolve for the trailer. So mostly free programs, I think Aseprite is paid.
I think just the sustained effort it took to finish it. It took me a really long time to finish and that can be a little demoralizing. A year ago I probably thought I was almost done, I had no idea I had a year left.
I think I'll be a lot more efficient on my next project because I learned a lot, I'd also probably also do a smaller scope game. It was tempting to go back and rewrite a lot of my earlier mistakes, but if the code was working and not causing new problems, sometimes I just kept it. My goal was shipping a game, not perfect code.
Going through the process of getting a game on steam was a great learning process. Now that I know how to do it I won't hesitate much on the next one. I'd probably share and playtest my game much earlier for feedback.