Wrapping up this series of "mentor advice" threads, we're going back to a question from last year, inviting this year's mentors to share their most important advice for finishing and releasing projects. If you're feeling time pressure or wanting to reflect on what to learn for future projects as we close in on the last 24 hours, you might find some helpful perspectives here!
Akien
Don't underestimate the time it takes to _release_ software. You need to prepare your page on itch.io, export builds, make sure that they work on your target platforms. Don't wait until the last minute to try this out - you can have some preliminary builds ready long before the deadline, and update them once you're done with the jam dev phase.
It's a good opportunity to get some friends to playtest your prototype while you keep working on adding more content or polishing what you have.
Cheeseness
Don't be afraid to trim your scope down. If you have 20 items on your todo list and only have time/resources for 15 of them, look at the work that's left and ask what each item contributes to the core experience you want to convey in exchange for the effort it requires.
Weigh up the "cost" of that work against the cost of smoothing over the gap that it might leave behind. If it's not supporting that core experience, you can probably do without it, and if it is, you've just ranked its priority.
Trevor
It's absolutely worth tracking your time spent and what you accomplish during that time during each work session; it helps you better plan for the time you have left and realise far earlier if you need to cut game elements to meet your deadlines or whether you have time to add extra polish!
StraToN
Make a pause during development. Don't touch your game for a couple of days. Play some games to refresh your mind. Then go back to development. Iterate.
jotson
Practice making full games. Lots of people tinker with ideas, mechanics, art. Pieces of games. And they move on from project to project. You can get pretty good at those pieces over time. But you'll never ship a game that way. You need to practice the boring stuff too. Menus, settings, game over screens, control mapping, uploading to app stores, etc. All of those things that are not the game but allow players to actually play it. One way to practice the full development cycle is join game jams.
kubecz3k
First of all you need to prioritize things correctly, think about what's the difference between a playable game and a half baked prototype, ask yourself following questions:
- Does your game have clear "completion" conditions? Is it possible for the player to achieve them? If not focus on that, there is no game if player cannot win, simplify if you must!
- Do you have any kind of tutorial? Will it be possible for other person on the other side of the globe to just download the game and start playing? It's definitely worth to have tutorial in some form, the beauty of it is, it can be done very quickly, in most cases an image displayed at the beginning of the play will do (bonus points for binding F1 key)
- Releasing a game is not only about programming, keep that in mind and be smart about it Are you trying to tackle an issue for 90 minutes without a success? I will not advice you to go take a walk since most probably you have only couple hours left, but maybe it's a great time to create jam page for the game? Or test the process of generating a playable build?
- So, you got your playable build, the game has a jam page and there is still some time left that you would want to spent on adding some polish to the game? Great! Are there any sounds in the game? If not I think that it will might add the most to the "game feel" with the least effort. Start with some background music it will help to hide the fact there is not so much sounds in your game :) Then add samples for the most common actions like jumping, shooting, dealing damage and voilà! You have just improved the feeling in your game by a great factor!
A very big thank you to this year's mentors for sharing their time, attention, and perspectives with everybody across the jam!