Post-mortem of Mission Squeak
Making Mission Squeak was a lot of fun for us and we have to thank everyone in the game jam for all the motivation and help on Discord and our Twitch viewers! For us, Mission squeak was our first game (and game jam game) in 4 years, so we were really, really rusty on every element of Game dev from planning to development.
Efficiency
Since we knew that it would be hard to get back into working with Unity, we decided to plan a relatively simplistic game, where we would focus first on the puzzles and take some shortcuts using an asset pack for the animation of the dogs to save us a lot of time. We had delved into animation before the game jam and struggled a lot so thought it would be the best way for us to not spend too much time rigging/animating.
Scope
We really nailed scoping the game to make it both manageable to complete in the 2 week jam deadline without burning out or getting tired of the game. Having experience with making other projects with deadlines helped us a lot but we did misestimate quite a few elements of the coding that took longer than we first anticipated.
Detection mechanic
One of the mechanics we struggled with was the guard detection system. We were live streaming on Twitch while making the first iteration of it, but we found a lot of bugs during testing that needed to be fixed, so we changed approach. Christer went back to the drawing board and used a video from Sebastian Lague to improve the field of view visualisation.
Publishing
Publishing the game was also a first for us. We have never used Itch to publish a game before, nor any other game publishing platform. So we spent a long time trying to figure it out and had to publish multiple builds before it was working properly. In the end, we used Butler from Itch to help us out, but since it was the last night before going away on holiday, we were both afraid we wouldn't get it published in time.
Team work
Christer and I have worked as a team for the last 6-7 years, so we had very little issues working together and pair programming was a lot of fun for us to do since we both learnt a lot and being both relativity new to Unity, it was very helpful to debug things together.
Soundtrack
Our musician, Thortrillion, was also someone that we have worked with for quite a few years and after a bit of direction, he absolutely nailed the music for Mission Squeak. We really wanted a cute, mysterious soundtrack and we just fell in love with the melody and atmosphere as soon as we received it. Looping was a bit of an issue as we were still figuring out how to transition the music in Unity, and keeping the music between levels without lag. We found out that it was fine in the final build, but it was confusing us like crazy during development.
Sharing the process
We were able to publish two YouTube videos and stream three times during the jam which helped us to see what we could improve and fix some bugs along the way. You can see the two videos here:
Part 1:
Part 2:
What could we do better next time
We both feel like we would have liked to have published more beta builds of the game earlier, so that we could have had feedback on the levels during the development. Knowing how each puzzle works makes it way too easy to solve the game in a few minutes, but for someone else it could be really hard. Had we known more about how Itch publishing works, we would have definitely published earlier in the jam for some feedback rounds.
Thank you to everyone who gave us feedback and helped to motivate us during the jam. It has been so much fun and we look forward to playing all of your games :D