Post-Jam thoughts

Hey folks, so it's been 2 months! And I've had a great response to this project, enough that I got a good feeling this'll be my next major project post-MDay.

Now to set expectations: I want to continue taking a break from any major projects - having spent over a year for a single project was a killer for me personally - so I'll be another small project to help breathe out. But I do want to continue this! In my mind I have ideas for other scenes, gunplay, and more spicy scenes (minigames anyone?). But most critically is that this game has a good loop to build upon.

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My immediate takeaway off this game was: oh hey, Pre-Production? As like, a stage of development? Where you sit down, scope, prototype mechanics, get a more formal idea of what you want to set out to make? That?

SUPER HELPFUL.

In this case, ahead of the jam I spent most of July on/off pondering the following base 'components' for the game:

• What's the feeling & plot I want to tell? What setting would fit that? How much writing will it need?
• I know I want to do another Mechanic/VN mix, and I feel like making a loud FPS, so how will that work?
• It's been a while since I did some NavMesh-based AI and an AI State Machine, how to do that?
• (...and how do I animate/setup a spicy scene? 😳)

And after spending some time on one, time on another, I had my various prototypes & narrative planned. No actual writing, or gameplay, but each component now had a 'gist' of how hard/long it would take to implement with some more content.

So from there I kinda just had a big checklist to go through for July: get a first draft of the writing, game loop, and combat.

Then, August became a month of adding the sex scene, revising gameplay to be more approachable, or altering the order of stories to flow better (removing some, and adding one for the tutorial astronaut), and adding a tutorial level (which, uhh yeah I thought just throwing people in with 0 context would be better, but an actual level usually works out better!)

At this point, I was at one week left aaaaaand I ran out of steam. I think just having a first/second/third draft of the various components with such a close end date caused that fun anxiety/procrastination mix to occur, so I just got some final fixes in following the first public build.

But hey! Got another game done, some more experience: having prototypes or rough flows helps a lot to give you an actual taste of what you need to achieve. From there you can mentally plot out the whole scope (which will change as is want to do, but you have a better foundation)

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I'll try writing up some thoughts or tech-dev-logs as I go, but for now: if you're keen on this game, please comment/leave a review/follow me for updates!

And if you found this jam project interesting, I reckon you might want try the demo for my previous project, A Day of Maintenance!