I set up links for people to provide credit to them for their amazing work. I have no affiliation with them so these thoughts are my own.

Now that the #ShadowdarkIndependenceJam is over, I figure now is a good time to look back at what I did and what I learnt from it. But first up, thank you to Baron de Ropp for running and hosting the game jam. It was the shot in the arm needed to actually take the massive collection of notes and parsing through them to create something that felt worthy of being provided to the community writ large.  I'm not very active in the Discord & I've never really written an adventure in full like this, so there was a lot of just figuring things out that I feel much more comfortable with now for the next projects.

THE PROJECT - ESCAPE FROM THE UNDERDARK
I knew from the beginning I wanted to write a gauntlet adventure. I like the rules as written in Shadowdark (pg. 116) as a good way to introduce a group of players to a new game system and the tone/theme of your campaign setting. Shadowdark naturally has a gritty element to it more commonly found in OSR titles compared to more modern TTRPGs.  I wanted to embrace that. I approached the gauntlet as what would cause a person to risk certain death - and concluded freedom/hope. Because there are a multitude of historical examples to pull from indicating the truth of it, I started the players in a situation where they were slaves to drow. Which, I imagine the controversial nature of that in our current cultural climate is probably where my lowest ratings came from. No comments provided feedback for why the low scores were given, so I can only speculate. I could be entirely wrong. 

The second major decision I made was to make the Underdark deadly such that combat should be avoided in favor of stealth & subterfuge so that time became the major resource the GM attacks. In that regard, I left the map modular so that a GM could shuffle it up and increase replayability, but provided an example of a potential layout where the players could get to their destination in as little as traversing 4 caverns. 

Third, I choose to put things in the A5 page format that Shadowdark & Cursed Scrolls are published in. Going for something more professional/polished. I found myself restricted by the size and this was probably my biggest setback. The smaller size took away the ability to provide basic world-building details like factions earlier on. I didn't have a way to really mark random loot that could be found. There wasn't the space to include a lot of NPC detail. Essentially, the benefit was that I had to be incredibly succinct (and I think that benefited the project as a whole), but I also probably stripped out a lot of material that would have helped GMs running it for the first time, etc. 

THE JAM - LESSONS LEARNT
The first thing I learnt, is that a lot of people don't comment until the review phase and even then, feedback is sparse. I probably could have had someone pointing out the drawbacks of some of my design choices if I had used the community much more and that's on me. I should definitely engage the Shadowdark Discord much more.

Second, professional or final projects do best. People appreciate the quality of effort put into a product so the closer it is to a final end product, the better. Also, don't unnecessarily handicap yourself so that your project doesn't seem finished because it is missing some of the basics or extras that would send it over the top. Art is useful, include it for setting tone.

Third, it's infinitely better to make something that screams with personality than not. While I feel my project had personality, I stripped a lot of it out to make it generic enough anyone could add it to their campaign setting. (Not to mention size restrictions I handicapped myself with.) 

Fourth, I could probably use a partner for the accountability aspect of things. I'm a bit controlling though in my perfectionism, so it's a weird dichotomy I need to figure out, but it would have been nice to have someone who could help share some of the burden so I wasn't trying to develop everything by myself in a mad rush after burning out at work at the beginning of the day. 

SO WHAT'S NEXT?
I'm not entirely sure. Part of me wants to go make a v1.1 and add in some of the things I stripped out. Part of me also wants to move to the next project so it's actively being worked on and I can just go through the process of building the habit of getting things completed. I also want to know where Reverse Ettin Games got the assets for making the paper and cover look worn. Someone please tell me. 

But I'm still taking feedback. Is there anything else I should be aware of that I may have done poorly? Is there a particular thing I should work on next?