I'll toss mine in, why not!
All Systems GOGOGO!! by CuffButton
This is my first jam ever so I was definitely over-ambitious with what I thought I could do. Even being a little afraid to try a jam I just really respect Kenney and Kay and their assets have been an awesome boon to me during the learning experience. This just felt like an extension of that so I guess it felt like a safe place to try for the first time!
At first I was a little disappointed by the theme. Isn't power a core idea in almost every single video game? I didn't get an inspiration from it but then, after taking a bit of a walk and letting the concept marinate, the idea of being in charge of the power distribution in some sort of spaceship or robot really started to coalesce in my mind. While thinking, my mind went back to what was probably my first experience with piloting a giant mech in a video game; Mystical Ninja Geomon for the N64. I can remember thinking the robot fights in that were so silly and fun at the time...I think I even had a save on a memory card that was right before the first mech fight and I would go back and play it just for funsies.
So that's basically what I did. Majorly "borrowed" some core concepts for that and made it so you didn't control actions directly but instead provided them power. Like you're just the engineer and someone else is the pilot.
I had two big setbacks during this but I think my biggest missed opportunity is game clarity of what the enemy mech is doing and the status of your own mech. I had a friend record some voice line callouts that were supposed to tutorialize and help with clarity when like, the enemy is charging an attack, or when you're near overheating, or explaining the "curse" mechanic I built in. Unfortunately I didn't have the time to implement them BUT during development I did have a running log of print statements that were intended to mimic the timing of these callouts so I could tweak them during play. When I knew for a fact I wouldn't have time to implement the voices I feel like I should've exposed those print statements to the player. Ultimately that's what I did with some hud elements like player health. It would've fit in the aesthetic too to just expose like, a log to the player to give them more context. Huge lesson to learn on scope haha.