Posted January 28, 2025 by Rakudajin
The GWJ is over, and it was very exciting!
I guess my game ended up being too long and too ugly, so it got the least reviews compared to the previous two Jam Games (Space Tag and Frozen Bells), but it ended up with the highest score of all my games :)
I'm definitely planning to turn it into a full-fledged game in the next 2-3-5 months, making it a rogue-like. I already have quite some ideas on how to add replayability and make the loop shorter and smoother.
So what obviously went wrong is - my pixel-art. It was my first attempt to do visual art for the game myself, but clearly, it didn't go well enough. But I really wonder - was it ugly as in "unpolished" or ugly as in "don't drow anymore"? It's clearly unpolished - I had only 2 days to draw ~60 different tiles and ~30 different units. And I clearly didn't have enough time to do the interfaces. If I'd spent 5 times more - would it be good enough? Or not really? After all - I'm not an artist, and I pretty much never tried drawing until a few months back.
So I'm wondering whether I should keep the approach but draw better, or maybe switch to a less-demanding approach (like iconography, board-game like), or I look for a real artist? I guess I'll start with the second approach and see where it goes.
Another question is about Kafka content - I've added an audiobook... Was it worth it? And making a story that loops back to Kafka's Metamorphosis? It was the fancy part, but since pretty much no one mentioned it in the comments - was it too weird? I wonder whether I should keep it for the full-fledged version, or forfeit it? What happens in a jam stays in a jam? :)
Any comments are super welcome!