Throughout the development of "The Assembly Line", the game resulting from the jam I self-imposed upon myself, I learned about the importance of planning and the dangers of premature optimization. In a team-based development environment, creating a plan is integral to make any headway. When working alone, it's difficult to justify to yourself to sit down and create an entire layout of the application as you can create the plan as you go.

The final product is a game in which you drag "ingredients of recipes to areas of the screen to create the products you need and then submit said products.

You can view the GitHub for the source code (Unity). And here is the game's page where you can download and run it.

I filmed the entire process of development, which resulted in roughly 40 hours of footage, and will include screenshots and video segments below:

This was the result of planning at the start of development. It was a very rough idea of what I wanted to do, but no technical specifications of systems or code. The lack of this aspect of planning ended up hurting me in the long run.

https://clipchamp.com/watch/z5nsd7hZm5C
This video demonstrates me prototyping with the mouse control movement of the game.

This screenshot depicts what most of the development looked like. I eventually turned on my webcam while recording. In this moment, I am developing the system for spawning random items to appear during the game.

https://clipchamp.com/watch/7SiQ9jOWjoG
Here you can see me debugging the "rejection" feature of the game where if you place an item in the incorrect place, it is thrusted out of the bin. This is one instance of me overthinking the game and I would have benefited from having a more concrete plan in mind when jumping into development.

https://clipchamp.com/watch/8MP40meVd1L
This video shows the game in its nearly finished state. Although I enjoy the gameplay, it's clear that I'm still overscoping the game as I am continuing to make plans for the future when I say "I need to ramp up the difficulty".

In the end, I created a game. It's not a perfect game, nor does it quite fulfill what I wanted it to, but it does exist. This development period taught me a lot about planning and making decisions early. I think it would be fun to participate in a team-based jam next as I feel the planning period would be more constructive and allow for a better base to build the game upon.