Hey guys,
Well it's been at least one very good nights sleep since the jam (I missed my alarm for work the first morning so I don't count that).
So I thought may as well go over what went right, what went wrong, and how I think we can improve the next one in regards to https://itch.io/jam/jamsepticeye/rate/3933330
The GOATS
First of all, major shout out to someonesly for their art, absolutely nailed the imagery beyond anything we've managed to do in any jams previously. And double that shout out to Waifu Games for complimenting the art with some shader gpu black magic, I honestly was afraid to touch any of their code it was beyond anything I could have ever come up with myself xD
And lastly a shout out to my boy James Mc adding in all that juice and tonal settings really upping the feel and tone of the game. These guys nailed their roles exceptionally, never had a Jam go so smooth then crumbling only to be saved again.
So how was our journey?
What went right?
First of all, I truly believe the first evening where we got everyone discussing the theme helped slow us down enough to not run in guns blazing.
We broke down every idea we had, thought hard about the genre (more on this later), and went with what at the time seemed like a simple 1 screen game about min maxing your resources against the needs of the deity.
This gave us room to experiment and come up with ideas but more importantly, get something made quickly that we could test and check if the feel was right.
By the end of day 2, we implemented everything we thought we wanted from the original idea to find some of it just didn't feel right, we bounced between ideas before just implementing the god hand mechanic and checking how that felt and it really changed our view on the game but we were left with a crushing dilemma, how do we balance a resource management game with so little time?
The solution didn't come right away, we countered each others points checked values, ran spreadsheets, then it hit us (sort of). We use the deity as a discard bin. We began to look at the game more of as a game of black jack where your hand moves and you can only see 1 card face at a time, with a time limit to dispose of the rest. It worked.
We had our game loop, we had our systems, we had a game, all we needed to do was balance the cards coming out xD
So... what went wrong?
To paraphrase someonesly, "I guess when working on a game jam game, you have to give time to also figuring out how to teach the player how to play huh?".
We had failed to get our rules across early to the player without having to explain it. Luckily we had two playtesters play it blind.
Watching them struggle to understand the rules made us panic. We had 4 hours to submit, we were sleep deprived, but we didn't wanna throw in the towel just yet.
Disagreements ensued about how to solve all the problems. Then, we came to the simplest conclusion. What if instead of getting rid of excess, we shifted the UI to be what the deity wants. Inverse the rules. 3 hours to go, that's exactly what we done. Working through the sleep deprivation, ignoring the invisible shadows in our peripheral vision we scrambled to get the code changed to meet this new design goal.
We hit it, the game felt smoother and more arcade like though there was a snag. We hadn't tested on WebGL since day two's first loop.
We made the build, it played for 5 seconds annnnd crash.... 43 minutes to go, we were running out of hope, time and energy, then a lifeline. An hour has been added to the Submission timeline. We got our second wind.
We raced as fast as possible to fix up the game and submit. We were done, battered and bruised with a little bit of tweaking and hallucinations to boot, but we done it, we submitted: https://itch.io/jam/jamsepticeye/rate/3933330
What can we do differently?
So, if we had to do it differently, what would I suggest we do?
- Consider our genre a little more for better and quicker feedback loops (we went from RTS to puzzle math by day 2/3)
- Get more play testers earlier (to make sure the loop is easily understood)
- Don't start with an RTS for a game jam (see point 1)
- Make those builds earler (we almost didn't get to submit in time)
- Improve communication (we ended up doing some double work at times)
- Focus more on juice (we left it to the end and before playtesting the 2nd to last version)
So yeah it's been a wild ride, and I've after making 2 more friends out of this experience and if you've enjoyed my little rant checkout our game https://itch.io/jam/jamsepticeye/rate/3933330
So... how was your game jam experience? Similar? Smooth sailing? A complete disaster? Let us know in the comments :)