This is my second postmortem after the one I made for A Platformer for Ants. This time I partnered with Nat Morillo and Joan Carles Vegas to make Tetratower, a mix between a Tower Defense game and Tetris.

You can play, rate and give feedback here!

I try to learn something with every jam I participate on, and this time working with a team remotely was the challenge. I woke up at 8:00AM to see what theme was chosen this time. Combine 2 Incompatible Genres. It wasn't my first choice. Well, it wasn't even a choice really. Not my kind of theme. I wanted to combine 2 game genres, so I started thinking. Nat, Joan Carles and I started talking trough Discord and after a lot of combinations one felt nice to all of us, Tower Defense and Tetris. The idea was simple, complete and felt doable without stress.

After the chat, I started prototiping the Tetris part of the game, I felt like it was the most hard of both. In the meantime, Nat and Joan Carles started with the concepts of the game. I really like working with great artist like them, because the "This gonna be ugly AF" feeling is out of the equation. The problem here is that I liked everything they gave to me, I'm very bad at criticism when art is the subject. But, look at that, it's awesome.

In a few hours I had the Tetris part of the game done and working. After that, I started with the wave system and the enemies. That part was easy, because it's not my first rodeo with Tower Defenses. Also, this time I felt like sharing, and I streamed part of the development on Twitch. It was fun, but I think it slowed me a bit.

After resting a bit I integrated the art and animations. That part was also easy, I work everyday with 2D sprites and Spine animations and was a piece of cake.

After that, the only thing to do was polish, polish and more polish. After finishing the menu, I improved the animations of the enemies after receive damage, I tried to solve some bugs caused by the moving columns and played a bit to improve the difficulty curve.

We had a fight one moment for a stupid thing we didn't talk about too much. That was my fault, I wasn't stressed but during jams I'm very salty. I don't want to make stupid mistakes and this makes me and awful person sometimes. After resting and talking, everything was ok (I hope :<).

The last day everyone was happy with the result, but some of us felt that something was missing or could be improved. The lack of time with this or not testing it enough was the problem. After all, we were 3 people but only me played the game during the development. The idea for the next time is let the others play the game sooner in order to have time to improve more things.

Overall, I'm very happy with the result, the game is BEAUTIFUL and looks complete. The gameplay is very basic but is polished enough. It's easy to modify or add more waves if we want to. Wihtout doubt, working with a team was a great decision.

What went well - Awesome team. - Beautifull AF. - Solid but simple gameplay. - Streamed part of the development. - No stress.

What went wrong - I provoked a stupid fight. - Lot's of things we wanted to do got cut of the final build.

Tools - Unity 2017 - Visual Studio 2017 - Photoshop - Spine

That's it. I hope this was useful to someone. I had a lot of fun making this game, with luck the same you'll have playing it.

Thanks for reading!