I always downplay the amount of effort that polish takes, and end up at the deadline with a game that is very rough around the edges, which unfortunately considerably brings down the experience for the player when the deadline hits! I guess it all starts with having a small scope under control that you can deliver in half the jam's duration or so...
Very cool to hear about how you leveraged your game engine. Are you thinking about open-sourcing it or showcasing it at some point? I think I saw a few other games made by people who built their own scumm-like engine in unity.
re: polish, yes, it’s all about scope, pretty much. Less to do, more to polish. And insane time put in. I probably put in about 150hours on the game in 2 weeks. Pretty insane schedule.
re: engine, no. It’s ok for me, but nowhere near something other ppl could use or would want to. Something like PowerQuest (my recommendation if you have some programming / Unity experiecne), Adventure Creator (Unity), or AGS / Visionaire etc are much better choices. I was just working on it and at some point I was like “I have enough to get close to making an old Scumm game?”
What about you? What did you use for your game?
I ended up using unity and building everything from scratch, partly because I was naive thinking that this type of game would be easy to make. After all, what's there but a few animations and a couple of dialog trees... Oh boy was I wrong!! :)
What saved me though is that I ended up finding really outstanding artists / musicians / vocal actors - all randomly through reddit / discord, meaning it could have gone in a very different direction -- but they ended up taking on all the artistic work from A to Z. On top of being super talented, they were all super accommodating with their craft to speed up the development process as well. It still came down to the wire, and I still wish we had had a few more days of polish, but overall it's only been made possible by the fact that I was surrounded well (see our game credits).
A lesson for work/life perhaps... :)