Postmortem
A retrospective written after a game ships, capturing what worked, what failed, and what to change — grounded in the decisions made during production.
A postmortem is a structured retrospective. It asks three questions: what did we do well, what did we do poorly, and what would we change? Done well, a postmortem is a design asset — a document the next project team reads before they start, not a feelings exercise the current team does before they disband.
The most useful postmortems are specific. Not “communication was bad” — that is every postmortem ever written. Useful: “the balance patch at week 14 wasn’t flagged in a design review because there was no process for patch-level changes to go through design. The fix: every change to a balance table requires a design review before it enters the sprint.”
Postmortems require a documented record to be specific. If decisions were made in meetings and channels without a written record, the postmortem becomes speculation about what happened. If decisions were made in version-controlled design documents with a merge history, the postmortem can point at exact commits.
How it works in Gameframe
In Gameframe, a postmortem has receipts. The merge history shows every design decision that landed on the main branch. The version history shows how the GDD evolved from the original concept to the shipped game. The Specialist Reviews logs show what findings the team acted on and what they deferred.
A postmortem written from a Gameframe vault is not “I think we decided X around week eight.” It is “the balance patch at week eight is merge request #47, reviewed by three designers, with the Game Designer specialist flagging a critical on the SMG falloff that we explicitly resolved before merging.”
Start free to build the documented record your next postmortem will thank you for.