Posted August 31, 2024 by Chubberdy
Alrighty, the game is out and I've had time to process feedback and discuss with the team, so let's do a post-mortem.
Bugs
There were a couple bugs that none of the dev team found, but there were a few notable ones that I didn't think people would trigger enough to be worth the time fixing for the jam. Clearly I was wrong! (damn you order bell) There's definitely a lot of stuff that got kludged in that made easily-avoidable problems. I gotta set up more generic elements with better parameters to tweak for game jams to avoid that next time.
Balance
I promised myself I wouldn't fall prey to overestimating the skill of first time players, but uh... woops. Tested the game too many times and got too quick before deciding on the par times. Definitely gotta leave the last day or so before submitting to let more fresh eyes play and change stuff like that based on feedback. The main complaint I heard was the par times being far too short, if people even realized there was a time factor at all. Speaking of which...
Intuitive design
Turns one easily miss-able line of dialogue saying the player was on a time crunch is NOT a good enough indication that time is in fact a factor in the scores. Ingredients disappearing when going between screens also seemed to be an issue (an early design decision that was carried through too far). Probably also could have been spotted with more testers.
Moving forward
Besides bug fixes, there are a few things I want to do to balance the game and flesh it out a bit. Here's a short list of expected changes.
- More lenient timer for orders
- Either bun spawners or plate moved to prevent bun blockage
- Timer in the kitchen to show how much it's affecting your grade
- Save system
- Gallery
- Toning down ingredient spinning, especially during the zero-grav day
- Meteor warning system
- Day selector
There's also definitely the possibility for straight up more content, such as more days with different effects and more customers. I definitely think this game has a lot of potential, I'm pretty excited to keep developing it after the Gain Jam is finished judging!