Post Mortem of a First-Time-Solo-Participant
This Game Jam has been a pretty tough one for me!
I have participated in one Ludum Dare and two other Game Jams so far, but always in teams of at least 3 people. This year none of my other colleagues had time, so I planned to finish this time in 48 hours and hand it in for Compo! I'm always using Unity, Photoshop and PyxelEdit.
Lets start with the theme: I didn't like it at all :sweat_smile:
But that shouldn't stop me from building something cool. I think, I struggled about 2 hours finding anything I wanted to build but finally I started working on something related to "Conway's game of life" but with hex-fields. In about 3 or 4 hours I had set up something functioning. So I experimented a bit with the more or less game I have created and started to realize, that this one wasn't fun playing at all. So this is how this idea died! :sweatsmile:
After that realization, I chatted with a friend of mine and we finally got an idea that I wanted to build.
You are the blood source to a vampire and are prisoner in his dungeon. So you have to spend blood, find ways to regenerate that and finally escape.
That's the idea of the game I finally made. But the first day was mostly over and I completed near to nothing :tired_face: The next day was very productive, but finishing the game and making all the assets myself was utopian. So this is how the idea of handing in for Compo also died!
I went with the Jam now and tried to do as much of the graphics as I could and added the rest from a library. At this stage I had a lot of the systems running. The character was able to move smoothly, collide with walls and interior and to interact with objects. Maybe I allowed my self to spend to much time finetuning some of the mechanics and visuals but it wouldn't be fun without that, right? :smile:
The last step was building the level and making sure, that there was at least one win- and loose-condition. Adding any sounds or menus wasn't possible any more. But that's ok. - I'm very proud of the art-style - The movement feels really smooth - I didn't even produce too bad code - I learned a lot! :slight_smile: