Hi! Just thought that I should spend some time reflecting on this jam and share a little of what I got out of it for anyone interested.
I'm pretty new to game dev and game jams in general. I feel that this was the best game that I've made in a game jam so far (or at least the one that I'm proudest of). It was mostly complete (except for audio) and the gameplay worked out well. My previous games were either incomplete, horribly buggy, or just not all that interesting.
I believe that the thing that helped most was the planning. I spent more time planning out this game (almost half a day) than I had for any other jam, and it really paid off. All that planning really helped me to solidify my game idea and the systems that I would use to implement the mechanics. I was also able to preempt problems on the development side and come up with ideas to solve them. As a result, the development went pretty smoothly, since I already had a good idea of how the game's systems will be implemented and they would interact with each other. I think the development time I saved was much more than the time I spent planning out the project.
As a programmer, art has never been my strong suit, but I've been trying to pick up pixel art. Its been really tough, but when I look back at my first projects (just cubes and squares moving around), I feel that learning that little bit of art really helped to improve my games, not just from a graphics standpoint, but for the design in general. I'm not exactly sure how to explain this, but designing game mechanics and getting the "feel" of the game right is much easier when there's a visual theme surrounding the game. Not to mention that play testing games that at least have some art in it is much more pleasant than play testing games without any art at all. Overall, learning a bit of art was definitely worth the time and I hope that more programmers would try out some art as well.
Clearly the game is still pretty much trash, but its been a really good learning experience and I had a lot of fun working on it. Thanks to Divitos for hosting this jam. I don't know if you have any plans to do this again in the future, but I hope that last minute jams (i.e. jams at the end of a month/year to encourage people to create games, no matter how small) will become a thing in the future.
Cheers!
