This is the first time I'm doing a postmortem, but I think this time the game really deserves it.

You can play it here!

I participated alone in the Jam modality. I wanted to participate in the Compo, but I really wasn't feeling that I was able to achieve something, so I taked it easy. I woke up at 9am, the LD starts here at 3am but I needed the sleep. When I saw the theme, "The more you have, the worse it is" I really liked it. But every idea I had was "if you pick up this items, that you NEED to pick up, the game becomes harder!". I really hated that kind of ideas. I started to procastinate a little, It wasn't until 11am that I got the idea of "the more you explore, the less (or more) you see".

I felt a huge motivation after having an original idea for once. I'm not the best of designers and generally my ideas suck. This time was different, I got something cool to work on it. So, I started to prototype the core mechanic: the zoom of the camera.

I got it working in no time. After lunch I got the zoom working and a few stages made. I was trying the new Unity 2017 tilemap editor and it really made the things easier. In the other hand, I don't know why, Visual Studio 2017 didn't work as well as it did Visual Studio 2015. That pushed me back a little trying to solve those errors (with no results...). Anyway, the core mechanic was made and I started to make some sprites to make the thing pretty.

Long story short, I'm no artist and I always feel very frustrated trying to reproduce my vision of the game to actual assets. This time was no different. I spent hours and hours (the entire evening and night) making the sprites you see in the gif. Only the tileset, the character is from OpenGameArt. I wanted to change it, but the times I tried to make something moving were always a waste of time.

I went to bed very frustrated: "I have an amazing idea, but in the end the game will be ugly and nobody will play it". That depressed me a lot. I didn't wanted to continue the game. That's always the reason I don't finish my projects.

But in the morning the tweets and comments telling me that the game looked cool helped me a little. I spent the morning working in the family business so I couldn't work in the game, but after lunch I started to work again. I made more sprites and give some light to the scene to improve the looks a bit.

That went nice, the sprites were still ugly but the light always help to see everything better (well, that has some logic thinking of it).

The motivation went out when I wasn't sure what more to do with the game. I didn't have a name either. So, my girlfriend told me "do some more stages, give a final to the game, and then we'll see". And I did that. Some final efforts to "finish" the game. I made an enemy, I made some stages and I put a timer to see how well you did.

The name went after that, when she told me that the game was for ants. The game was baptized. After that I polished it a bit on monday, I've added the music, some sounds and fixed some bugs.

What went well - I got an amazing idea - I implemented it very fast - I slept my hours

What went wrong - Problems with Visual Studio - Getting down with my insecurities multiple times - Getting stuck with art

Tools - Unity 2017 - Visual Studio 2017 - Aseprite

After the jam I improved the game with better platforming and some suggestions and the game improved a lot. I'm really happy and overwhelmed with the reception and good comments.

Thanks a lot for reading me and for playing my game. It really means something. Here you go a behind the scenes screenshot!