Post-jam analysis: This was the first jam I participated in while working a full time job. The decrease in time was apparent in the final quality of the game, and the greater stress. Saturday evening was coming around, and I still didn’t really have a game.
The coding was a big challenge for this game. I refactored a couple times, which added many hours to production.
I want to look into testing for godot. With a project as complicated as this was, testing would at least force me to write better, more understandable code, and it might even remove a significant portion of the 8ish hours I spent bug fixing.
I was able to throw all the art together in less than two hours. I had done the same sort of thing in my last game, so some of the process was the same. This time I colored it with markers, which definitely felt like the way to go. I scanned it and synced it with my computer the same way, using syncthing and the Synctrain app on my iPhone. Last time I used what I knew, Inkscape, to cut out each sprite. That ended up getting super laggy, as each sprite duplicated the entire scanned page. I decided to learn gimp this time, and it was so much better. Gimp is pretty much designed for this exact thing, and it was a breeze to create more sprites than I did last game. Next time, I should look into the Bimp plugin for gimp, as it seems that can aid in the mass exporting of sprites.
I had a “that looks so good!” moment after I created the area circle, and imported that into the game. The 3D sprites work together to make the trees feel like they are in a real scene, and it made the early decision to make a 3d game worth it.
This is the second 3d game I’ve made. I’m still not quite sure the best way to get mouse input. I used an area3d for the ray casting detection, but it feels pretty janky, and it’s not clear why sometimes the ray intersects the box and other times it doesn’t.
I know it doesn’t really fit the theme. I originally wanted to make a whole evolution simulator with tree population growth and life cycles, but I had to settle with a simpler game. I think I was able to boil down the core game play loop pretty nicely, but it lost a lot of the thematics.
The next thing I would have added, if I had been given an extra hour, was a leaderboard. This could have given a finality to the game and made a good reason to keep trying. I found it wasn’t too difficult to make a leaderboard for my Icarus game, but the UI and menus usually take a bit longer.
The best I got in the game was 1807, and the second best I got was 680. It isn’t very balanced when you can randomly get several white cards in a row. If I could really polish it, I would limit the number of possible cards that can be played each round. I could have turned it into a deck builder game.