Jam postmortem - Death's Contracts

This game was a solo project built for the Jamsepticeye game jam 2025.

Overall the project went well but there are a few issues in gameplay, my codebase, and rather frustratingly, a bug in Unity post security issue

The main issue in the final build is the lack of any audio.
Ultimately, audio is a skill I'm lacking in, knowing this, I set aside some time to try source some audio from various sites and implement into the game. Once I had, I wasn't happy with how any of it sounded, and ultimately didn't have the time to polish it up. At the time, I figured if I was adding audio that would almost definitely be muted, I might as well not add it at all, so I ended up scrapping the audio for this jam release.

One of the glaring issues was the gun sound, since completing contracts sped up the fire rate, and there is never a rest period from firing, it meant there was a constant bang sound playing at all times during gameplay which was obnoxious regardless of volume, some variance in sound effect would help this, but it also brings into question how the weapons work in the game, maybe there should be a reload mechanic to break up the monotony of the sound.

On that note if someone with audio experience is reading this, would appreciate any insight on how to solve this issue with gun fire.

The next issue I noticed after seeing a few people play and reading feedback, the balancing needs a lot of work, which I did know but didn't know exactly where the issues were.

Ultimately there are far too many enemies when first starting a run, I should have eased the enemy count as the game went on instead of just bombarding the player with almost the max amount of enemies immediately.
The core issues that affects gameplay however, which I was conscious of, is lack of enemy variety, whilst each enemy has a different health, speed and damage, they are fundamentally the same.
Some enemies with varying methods of attacking the player would help here, I did experiment with this somewhat with the boss enemies, but even that is somewhat flawed due to time constraints.

Thankfully, the only bug I managed to find, which is easy to ignore as a player was with the boss enemies attacks, to achieve this with minimal thought and to integrate it with what I had already built for projectile and enemy collisions, I wrote a simple script to just enabled a collider after x seconds, which is where the root of the issue is. Damage on occasion is dealt, but most of the time, it just nudges the player aside without registering the physics event. Ultimately going forward I'll be stripping that logic out and writing something a bit more robust.
But regardless I'm happy this is the only technical issue I or anyone else found.

Naturally as with all jam projects, there is some nasty code written just to make deadline, so going forward there is a little refactoring to do.

I did however manage to write my contracts system in a way that should be scalable going forward, so other than the individual contract implementations, the system for deciding and tracking current contracts should be good to go for what I have planned.

Outside of the project, I have to mention the serialization issue I came across in Unity 6.2.6f2. It meant trying to serialize seemingly any collection would break the inspector and throw seemingly random errors in the console, This problem ate a little time during the jam, but thankfully didn't set me back almost at all due to the scope of the game. 

Thanks to everyone that tried the game out during the jam, and anyone that tries it going forward, feedback is always welcome. 

The jam version is still available via a web build and a download, provided I do actually continue with this project, I will keep the final Jam build available as a download.