Stardunks Reflection

At the start of the two week period that coincided with the autumn game jam, I already had an idea in my head for the perfect cozy game for autumn: A drinks making game where you run a cafe!

After a sobering process of development over the course of that two week period, my individual inadequacies in all areas of game development really struck me. I'm not an efficient coder, I'm an uninspiring artist, and I have no innate musical or sfx talent. This made me realize about halfway through development that this was never going to work as a solo project, despite the extraordinarily limited scope. I reached out to several people in the community and in my family and friends to help me heave this tiny project across the finish line.

I learned a lot, mostly in terms of my limitations in focus, creativity, and organization. Going forward, I'll be updating the game in a week with new levels, mechanics, and music, all of my own design, and hopefully increase my own abilities in those fields. Moving forward, I also hope to give the game a visual overhaul further down the road with 3d cel shading akin to donut county or sable.

This project is something I never would've thought I could do in the first place, so having anything at all out in the wild with my (pseudo) name on it is awesome beyond imagining, however I've also learned that to do what I have in my head, a team or teams of people will almost always deliver something of higher quality, with the obvious trade off of sharing creative control with others.