One step forward - GMTK Jam 2021 Postmortem

Now that GMTK 2021 has kind of died down. It becomes evident for us to look back and see what we've done wrong. Especially  since this is perhaps my personal worst game so far. To note: This does not reflect the teammates I've worked with, but rather more of a personal judgement and criticism for myself.

The game we made performed average at best, these are the results:

We developed a reasonable workflow using trello to organise our work and this was the backbone driving much of the independent work possible. There had been stressful moments regarding the code and troubleshooting but there was never any excessive crunch to my personal judgement.

Despite working with limited time after scrapping the first idea, we managed to pump out a second game in essentially a day and a half of jam time left. However, our limited time did not allow room for polish, something we desperately needed to make the game more appealing.

Post Development Phase
During release, the game did not garner as much attention. We had only around 17 ratings from 25 views on day 1. We had not made any attempts on marketing the game on the GMTK discord which I believed hurt the attention our game could have gotten. The highest views we ever obtained on a day were 43 views, and that was a result of the rate-for-rate system we participated in a seperate discord channel.

itch.io was also under heavy load and it was impossible to edit the game page with neat graphics to make it appealing and for the first few hours of the rating phase, we may have screwed up our chances very quickly. Our biggest mistakes were perhaps downplaying the role simple marketing has, even in non commercial settings.

Conclusions
There are a few simple truths that remain in the dust, we all still had fun as a team. It was rather invigorating and the team has expressed enthusiasm to participate in more jams. This was our first time working together (and also a first time working in Unity for one of us) so it was a pleasant experience if anything.

We've done our best given our troubles, but there was definitely things to learn from here. 

• Just make good games, not good ideas.
• Be sure to be confident with the idea to work on
• Trust in your team
• Marketing is important

Well, if you ever want to give our game a try, here is the link: https://steventus.itch.io/the-curse-of-the-everpong

We might work on a post-jam version down the line just to polish and fix the game, but probably no overarching changes in the game design.