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Thanks for poking around the GDD and the feedback.

I found fairly quickly  I have a bit to much free time atm to "motivate" myself to work on this, first week gone, worked on it once. I need to not conflict my passion for bartending at my student association, for the passion for game dev.

That little club means too much to me, but I also need a first "published" game. and currently I can't combine the 2 things. Maybe first actual game is an RPG inspired off the bartending lol.

This might change when I manage to land a job since then I have somewhat of a schedule back ;-;

Mind Hoarder is a Unit Hell game, think games like Vampire Survivor where you mind control enemies instead of outright killing them. 

My goal shifted from making the game I laid out in my GDD to getting my idea across as best I possibly could., when I realized the idea was not as straight forward as I thought it would be. Now I'm going to make it in February while streaming it over on Twitch. Making it the game I wanted to submit, plus then some.

Before I handed in my final GDD, I added a Retrospective in which I mentioned what I learned about my game dev process and progress, what my biggest pitfall seemed to be and what my plan is for my submission now that the Gamejam is over.

I feel like especially with ones first game jam entries the win is not going to be in winning the game jam, the win is in finding out how YOU make a game, what did and did not work. And most importantly, did you enjoy making a game and do you ant to do more. 

Do I wish I hit the Most Viable Product (or Prototype) goals I set in the beginning? Yes. Did I know it was an unlikely goal? also yes. Did I retroactively move the goal post closer to say to myself "I made the goals I set myself?" Hell No. If I don't allow me to face the failure "I set myself up to" I'm not able to appreciate the systems I put in place to help me achieve the goals I set. 

There is more value in utter defeat, than there is in a close win.

The project file in gamemaker sais a total time nearing 4,5 days spent in gamemaker. However this does not include me working in Aseprite or on my GDD, ect.

So in the end I wanna take a guess it took like a full 7 days at least to make what I have, including backend systems that are not in use atm ;-;

My first as well, Also really enjoyed the 2 week aspect. It meant that with me being between jobs atm I could really get stuck in for 8 - 10 hours a day. (Granted, sometimes that escalated to 12-16)

Also, it meant I could somewhat take my time trying to understand a function in Gamemaker, or think about how I want to implement my code in a way that future proofs the code as much as possible

(not that I needed the future proofing, but i'm gonna restart my project in February and get it to what I wanted to submit this jam, and then some)

wait what, but an int makes so much more sense. "Luckily" I did not get to the state that this might have been an issue, but it still baffles me.

I found out that I can pick up an engine relatively quickly, but then spend the time I gain from picking up the engine future proofing the expansion of my game.

I spent a full 24 hours on creating array functions to keep track of how many of what type of unit where on the board, So when I would implement a "buffing certain types of units" mechanic you could easily see how many of each type of unit you had under your control.

Could I have better spent that time on something like making an UI or better readability about when attacks happen? In retrospect, yes almost certainly.
But did it give me the reassurance that I can make a semi complicated system fairly quickly, and have those systems not break? most definitely yes.

It gave me the boost I needed to make my Champions of Breakfast in February, and to stream major parts of the development on at least Twitch. The dumb barely playable submission of mine (Mind Hoarder), will at the end of February be at least what I wanted to make for this Game Jam, and then some.

I did try to at least make the "animation debug frame" Red and 3 pixels instead of the one, but I get it's very hard to get info you of it atm

It might also be that the camera is not set up on a good view atm.

Image scale was the thing i struggled the most with tbh.

ty for checking it out :D