Postmortem - My thoughts after the game jam

The game jam officially ends yesterday. Congratulations to every participant!

I am really surprised of the number of ratings (69!!!) I got for Heartbeats. The game got an average of 4+ stars in every category except for fun. I think, objectively, the game was too easy and the fact I introduced some open world levels frustrated some players because of the core mechanic. I spent unfortunately too much time in creating the game mechanic and the level components compared to the level design.

Moreover, the game got streamed 6 times! This is amazing. I participated to many game jams before but this is the first time I got so much traction on my entry. 

Let me share some fun facts

The average playtime per player is 245 seconds (~4 minutes). 18.9% of players finished every level of the game!

Why did Heartbeats go better than my previous game jam entries?

My assumptions are:

• Heartbeats is a solo, easy and accessible game
• It was deployed to 3 platforms (Web, Windows, Mac)
• I spent relatively a lot of time in editing the Itch game page (logo, background image, gifs...)
• Heartbeats was on Itch home page for few days (!!!)
• I played, rated and left non-generic comments on other participants entries (50+)

What's next?

I am planning to work more on it and improve some parts of the game that were pointed by some players.  You can expect a release of a more polish and complete version soon :)

If you are interested to try some early builds and be part of improving the game, follow my itch profile or ... 

Special thanks to:

• Everyone who tested/gave some early feedback on Heartbeats
• Everyone who took the time to play, rate and leave a comment about Heartbeats
• Every streamer/youtuber who covered my game (if I missed your name, please contact me :)): TigerJ, SirAeron, Cryptic Hybrid, Tigerwaw, MrQuallzin and La.
• Game jam organizers