Two years ago i released my first full game. I had entered a two week game jam. I had been making games for Years but never put anything out and this was me being fed up. I was going to finish a game! The jam was the "on button game jam" and i had an idea to make my own take on a classic flash game i used to play.

The game was called chain reaction, several small balls bounced around the area and you could click once, anywhere. Wherever you clicked at a explosion would spawn, growing larger before fading out. if one of those balls hit your explosion the ball would spawn a new explosion and you would get points. the goal of each level was to get a set ammount of explosions.

I sat down and got to work, plugging away day and night on it. eventually the 2 weeks went by and I uploaded, pressed publish, and fell into a deep depression. it would be a further 2 weeks before i really looked at what i made, and 2 years before i started making games again.

chain was... not good i had made a series of terrible choices in both game and technical design. The explosions were made using particle systems and each of those particles had full collisions turned on. that was how i was detecting wether or not an orb was hit and this came with HUGE preformance issues. especially since the game was mainly made for android phones. the orbs due to how i did the bouncing basically had 8 directional movement, and to make matters worse the game actually got easier as it went on...

I had made the levels procedural, so rather than hand making levels each one just multiplied the required explosions, and spawned orbs by a set value. by level 15 there were SO many orbs in the scene that it was nearly impossible to fail. in fact it was nearly impossible to not get 100% of them. The game was bad and didnt even come close to placing in the jam and honestly i was crushed by it.

When i did finally come back to game-dev i was making horror games, and ONLY horror games. and chain always bugged me, i didnt even use that itch account anymore but knowing it was out there ate at me. I had joined a new game jam group "untitled game jam" and had made 4 horror games for the jams that i was fairly happy with.  Then came Untitled Game Jam #93, its 5th birthday. The theme? "One Button".

By this time, I was a  MUCH better programmer, and designer so after some gentle nudging i entered the jam. and began the process of remaking chain. This time I made sure to correct my earlier issues. of course this time i used a standard collision shape instead of particle collisions (though it is still heavy on particle effects), i also hand designed the levels this time, I worked on it this time probably 5 or 6 days in total and pumped out re:chain (playable here)

and as it turned out? people enjoyed it, so i am comiiting to updating it up to version 2.0 adding new levels and features as I go. the game jam results dont come in until tomorrow but im optimistic we will do okay. and for once im proud of what i've created, the dark cloud of chain is finally lifted and i feel so much lighter.