Alakajam 21 (2025) post submission devlog

Damn.. that was tiring..
I think I budgeted my time pretty well, took 18 hours to get where we are now, but Im very proud of the end result
I originally wanted to introduce simple ship upgrades and put it off as the absolutely last thing and sadly that was quite out of scope, didnt even manage to add a Pause Menu😭
There's also some minor hick-ups like the Battery Packs having disabled collisions as they were acting a little off before and I didnt manage to fix that nor bring them back, there is no highscore saving, the Dash has no sound as well
I am planning to fix those things and add QoL in a post-jam update in 2 weeks

This was a very fun and productive Jam and Im glad I came back to game jams (thanks to this video), as its pretty hard for me to commit and finish a project properly and I have too many ideas where I cant lock in on making a good design.
And also finally made a finished Godot game (as Ive been playing around in the engine for like above a year now), and damn Godot is such a breeze to work with, I love it, with Unity I would've had to recompile each time waiting like 20 seconds (on a decently beefy PC mind you), and everything would be so clunky, and Ive got enough of it in my dayjob; while Godot is so fucking straight-forward and I actually fw the node-based approach, its so easy to differentiate stuff and get into the Component-based approach (for some weird reason maybe some people use Components properly in Unity where they split stuff, I never did that properly lol)

Im also thankful my younger brother is a goated music producer and made me a good looping track for the game as I still haven't gotten around to learning music even tho I really want to. He also has helped me quite a bit with brainstorming for the game

I also talked after the jam with my friend and he gave me some good feedback to probably replace the dash with an ability to completely stop (which I was initially kinda considering), removing / upping the limit of your inventory? (because the player is getting punished for being ambitious rn), and probably removing the timer as it serves no purpose