Now, that the jam is over, perhaps we could reflect a little on our projects.
I spent a lot of time making my game endless, in keeping with one of the themes. But, I later realised that the recommendations insist that each entry have an ending. So, I scrapped it all and switched to using set maps with some procedural generation, to ensure each play through is different. Had I known, I would have avoided wasting so much time on making an endless 3D open world.
What would you have done instead?
We had a testing build on Tuesday but it didn't test 100% of the features of the game. This ended up biting us later on the last day because there were several features that worked well in their own environments but needed additional adjustments to work together. I knew the risks going in but we made all of our assets during the jam and some of them weren't ready for testing until later in the jam.
Checking for a working VPN Access to my NAS before going on holiday with my laptop on tuesday and dont have access to the blendfile and prepared assets. 馃槄
And dont plan on submitting while on a train. The upload took ages and I was really dieing inside. Getting the submit through 3 Minutes before the end was just lucky. Not again. Too much stress. 馃槀
But all in all I am quite pleased with my first itch.io Jam. 馃檭
Not fully play testing a complete playthrough. All my maps played correctly but string them together with a little vestigial code acting up and now I'm not sure my game is even completable. It really sucks because I could very easily patch it out, but now every one who plays is going to quit for having absurdly high random encounters.
I was using Godot with GDScript and it bit me a couple times in the a** while trying to refactor something, so that was no fun. And not having a fully typed Language made it also more error prone to use. So next time I will trying ont Godot鈥檚 c# support and hope for the best. ;)
I also lost focus of what is important and whats not gameplay wise, thus I often found myself focused on tasks like generating assets but not having actual gameplay. So next time I鈥檓 focusing on getting gameplay done first and assets / polish last!
most important thing i've noticed is modularizing your code, in our case using unity. The bigger your files become, more cluttery and difficult it will become to modify or implement more features. Adapting an early "its ok to do it like this and will fix it later" can snowball and end up doing everything the easy way and making everything down the road harder and slower.
I would have done map testing days earlier. I ended up scrapping the dungeon generation system I was working on, and instead I had to deal with grid issues down to the deadline. I also would have ironed out animation bugs with the enemies from the very beginning. More knowledge for next time I suppose!
I ended up sticking a lot of the functionality into the FPS controller rather than abstracting it properly. I think with game jams you tend to throw a lot of stuff into the easiest place because... Well, because you don't have a huge amount of time to architect it properly.
It resulted in some right old spaghetti signals back and forth to get some of the features working for me!
Must admit, lot of things worked smoothly as intended, but beside the overscope - which partially was calculated in the first place - I lost a lot of time by bringen realtime enemies into the mix. My expectation was to do turn based battles in a seperate screen, but after switching to a very different them铆ng after a few hours, realtime confrontation seemed a much better fit. Further, I should have sticked to the smaller designs of the maps, but that felt to uncrawly. Anyway, although the game is very unfinished in its set dressing and lacks multiple enemies, I'm still happy with what I achieved in that time frame.
https://sunsailor.itch.io/litany-from-beyond-dcjam24
Nothing actually, I litteraly did everything I could in the few days I had, this gives me the rare feeling of "being completly happy with your Gamejam Game" haha, I know my game is missing a lot and has a lot of flaws but I really feel like I directed my energies very well this time and feel like I matured, dunno this is getting deep anyway this is my game I need to do some advertising otherwise I'll come back here to write "Wish I advertised more" lol
I ran into an issue of not making enough time for the jam throughout the week or so either due to things that came up or just not working on it, so better time allocation would definitely have made it better (I definitely would've had more time to bug fix then lol). I also probably could've gone a lot harder on the theming because right now it's sorta kinda related but it's not great (in my opinion)
I had too many planned things during the weekend that took away the time i had available. Basically both weekends were booked up with prior commitments, and the only free time i had was after my already full time job. I still managed to put 56 hours into the game (Thank you steam for tracking that) This lack of time introduced some heavy crunch and caused a lot of corners and play testing to be cut.
