I joined a game jam called Devtober 2021 and finished it. But one of the recommended things to do was to make a post-mortem or something that explains the positives and negatives of the experience. And here I am talking about my game, Number Cruncher.
Experience
I started making Number Cruncher before the jam, but it was originally a clone of the Castle Crashers minigame, All You Can Quaff. I made it because the minigame was removed from the remastered version. I forgot about the project and suddenly remembered it when there was only one week left in Devtober.
I started developing the game again and added some important aspects, such as AI, difficulty options, win and lose screens, a main and pause menu. The problem was that there were N O V I S U A L S when playing the game except for the score counters and key press indicators. Then, I started making some backgrounds and visuals for the score system.
At the time, there was only 3 days left before the deadline and I still had to make the characters and food which would take a LOT of time. So, I switched objectives and loaded up a backup version of the project. I thought of a way to make the numbers the main visuals without the screen being too empty, so I thought that making the game look like it was being played inside a calculator was a good idea. So I started to modify the main menu's graphics, added the in game visuals and it was finally finished and posted 12 hours before the deadline. I wasn't too proud of how it looked because I only made the calculator aesthetic in one day but it was all I can do for that amount of time.
What I learned
I learned a lot of things during this game jam but this is the most important one for me.
Don't Procrastinate.
Because I had a month to develop the game I put it off until I only had one week left to develop it and I knew I could have made a better game if I made better use of the time given to me rather than playing Roblox everyday.
That is it for this devlog! Please check out the finished game HERE and share your feedback to help make my games better!