Posted August 25, 2020 by zekthesnek
First off, I regret not doing a devlog at all now as we're heading into the rating process. Though, being generally tight for time, I guess it only makes sense that I would avoid spending too much time on anything else other than development of the game.
So, right. This was my first time submitting to a game jam. However, my day job is being a professional game programmer.... So, I participated with my younger cousin (GucciSushi) who is in high school and has zero experience in game development, but was excited to learn! I just wanted to see what I could do with such short time constraints. And also, I've never completed a *personal* game project before, so I was also seeing this as an opportunity to do something for myself for once.
ALSO, I just learned about this cool game engine Godot (you may have heard of it :P), and I just really felt like making a game with it for some reason. So, this was also the first time for me to make a game in this game engine, so that was fun!
In the decided to go with something relatively generic. I didn't really know what I would be able to accomplish, and how much time I would actually be able to spend on the game. So I didn't want to go crazy. Seeing as I ultimately spent about 36 hours total on the game, I feel like I accomplished quite a lot in that time, and I'm quite happy with the results! If I had been able to spend all 48 hours on this game, I'm sure I could have polished it up enough to make it more playable, haha.
So, some things that went well:
Things that could have gone better:
Ultimately, I think a lot of the issues could have been fixed with even a little bit of play testing. This seems like one of the most common problems with game jam games though. Stupid time constraints, hahaha.
I also need to work on my animation skills. More importantly, making animations more quickly, and designing for animations from the beginning. They're probably one of the most important things to polishing a game. Mostly because of how much it improves the feedback the user experiences.
There are also other small things that require that tiny bit of delay or extra feedback to really make it clear to the user what's happening.