I was just wondering how everyone is doing as today is the last day. This has been my first jam and I am very excited.
This is also my second game jam. I loved that this one lasted ten days. The other jam was just one weekend, and since I didn't have much time that particular weekend, I pretty much had to rush it out in just a few hours. This time, though, I was able to really sink my teeth into figuring out different programming challenges. My personal goal was to have different levels and branching dialogue throughout, so I'm happy I was able to accomplish that. My learning for the next jam: Give myself more time to focus on level design!
Looking forward to playing all of your games soon!
Congratulations!
It was my first jam too (but by far not my first game) — i wanted to know, how it feels, to have such a close (and hard) deadline. it is… GREAT!! Love it!
If I may, a couple of hints for you: Even if you just submitted, take your time, to do the following:
clean up source code, extract reusable parts (like if you made a small intro screen showing your logo - keep it! and in the next jam, you’re done with your logo in 5 minutes)
if you don’t have a small logo intro, maybe you want to create one now, that you’ve tasted blood (and want more ;-) - so your next jam can start with a cool logo-intro
write down your “lessons learned” and “mistakes made” to prepare for the next jam and hopefully avoid repeating the same mistakes.
common mistakes are: “i need assets, ok opengameart… click-click-download-download-download… oh damn! the credits? who was that? who published this?? searching again can cost LOTS OF TIME. I always create a bookmark-folder “jam” and put EVERY site in it, when i click “download” — then, when it comes to write the credits, i just go through all that bookmarks one by one and write down the names (and links, if necessary)
prepare TWO repositories for the next jam:
repo 1: develop there, commit a hundred times, put all assets, everything in it - this is your master-repo, containing everything
repo 2: this one stays empty until you push/submit your work to the jam.
Copy the final sources, cleaned up, only the necessary files to this repo and do one single commit. Submit this repo to the jam. Why? Because you have the full history in your Repo when you develop, this includes all assets (even if you delete them, they are STILL in the history and can be grabbed by anybody!) - and if you do not have explicitly the “redistribution” right of the asset in its license, you might violate the license terms. So, always push a clean, history-free repository to the jam.
Again, congratulations to your first jam! Cheers, Gris