Hey! Thank you for playing my game! Yep, I am a big time animal-lover, same goes for nature. I am sol glad you liked the overall theme and aesthetic of the game. Originally I was planning to make the blood effect black and white but then the idea of actually making it red seemed a bit crazy, and oh boy I am one heck of a crazy man.
So now to the questions,
1)I only chose in-engine optimizations, I am not very familiar with webgl and html yet so i did know of any external methods to optimize my game.
2)At first, everything was going smoothly. But due to me overscoping the game, the last 3 days were quite challenging. I did not even sleep the night before deadline just to get my game to a playable state. So yeah, it was quite hectic. But i am glad I did that.
3)I had this idea of making a game where your protagonist is sort of animal for a long time. This jam gave me the perfect opportunity to make something like that. The name “Deserved Deception” is referring to the deceptive nature of the drone(companion), and how according to drone’s pov, The fox deserved getting betrayed because of the evil ideologies of the drone. All through the gameplay, the drone helps us to fend off enemies, but if you reached the end, you will get to know that he just used the fox to retrieve all satellite parts, and then later killed it and stole the parts(I haven’t added this sequence to the game yet, but I will) for its own evil intentions. The idea that the drone will betray the fox has been given a bit earlier in the gameplay by the narrator, it will be more clear after I add subtitles to this game.
4)So, I developed a keen interest in game development like 5 years ago, back when I was in 6th grade. My computer teacher introduced us to qb64(QBASIC), and I was just amazed by the stuff I can do through writing text. A year later, I made my first game in qb64, which was basically a clone of space invaders. But I was really proud of it. In 2020, during lockdown, I was introduced to unity. I followed a bunch of tutorials on how to make a game on it but I failed almost every time. I did this for 2 years, and then left game development all together. Around 3 months ago, I suddenly got a burst of motivation to make games again, and for real this time. I saw this jam, and joined it, hoping that the cash prize will keep me motivated enough to finish it(it did actually). I am pretty sure I will not win any kind of prize because of the state of my game, but I am really proud that I actually finished and published a game for once, and now I am more motivated then ever to keep on this gamedev journey.
I kind of went overboard here, but I hope you got all the answers to your questions. Again, I thank you for playing and rating my game.