Now that Pawwnng has reached its release, it's a great time to look back and reflect on the development journey. Here's what went right, what went wrong, and the valuable lessons learned along the way!

The development of Pawwnng saw several successes, most notably the engaging core gameplay that kept testers coming back and the variety offered by the multiple game modes. The invaluable feedback from my classmates through consistent playtesting was also a significant positive, helping to refine the experience. A major hurdle was the significant memory leaks encountered, but ultimately, successfully diagnosing and fixing these by implementing proper resource unloading in each scene was a crucial victory for the game's stability.

However, the journey wasn't without its challenges. A considerable amount of development time was spent debugging the aforementioned memory leaks, which largely stemmed from not explicitly releasing resources like images and sounds when transitioning between scenes. Additionally, the initial code structure could have been more organized, which complicated the debugging process.

The key lessons learned from this project are the critical importance of explicitly unloading resources in each scene's unload() function to prevent memory issues, and the need to plan for resource management from the very beginning of development. Regular playtesting also proved to be an invaluable part of the process. (This is a reference to Love2D)

Moving forward, I will prioritize planning resource loading and unloading from the outset of any new project and strive for a cleaner, more organized code structure to facilitate easier development and debugging.