When we got the results from our latest game, Extinction Intervention, the results were a bit disheartening.

We had gone from first place two jams ago to 772nd. Our 16th jam together as a team may have been our worst yet, but that won't discourage us from continuing to create, learn, and have fun. We had decided to try something totally different from our previous games, and we are still proud of the final result.

Looking back at our jam process, we've identified areas where things worked out the way they were planned, areas where we could improve upon, and what our takeaways were from this LD.

For this game we tried to make a frantic, arcadey clicker game. Although the core mechanic is just clicking, each extinction source contributes to gameplay in a different way, vying for your attention.

The meteors represent a constant unstoppable threat, something you have to continuously go back to. The volcanoes force your attention away, if you leave them unchecked they make the entire game space more chaotic even though the threat of a lava rock actually hitting your dinos is pretty rare. The big wave is essentially a tank mob in any other game, with high hit points, if left unchecked will wipe out all your dinos, but takes a long time to get rid of allowing the other disasters to build up. The UFO directly targets a dino, making it the highest priority target.

The goal was to make the player strategically decide what to focus on at any given moment. However, because the core action was too simple and even tiring, it failed to give enough variety and depth to the gameplay. Perhaps if there were different actions to perform, and a greater variety of threats, the game could have been seen as more fun.

Additionally, if we had broken the game up into different Eras of time and focused on delivering each disaster/mechanic with more depth, players would get more moments of achievement and rest and could enjoy the game more.

~Vu (programmer)

From my earliest sketches I’ve always wanted the game to be bright and colorful to evoke a sense of urgency. Pixel art was always on my mind, mostly because it’s a medium I want to improve in. Although I am more comfortable with lower resolution pixel art, I thought that since the game takes place on one single, static setting, I could experiment with a 512x512 canvas.

That decision proved to be fairly costly. The clouds, ground, and water would take me the better part of a day to create, often placing the pixels one at a time, to maintain the pixelart aesthetic I wanted to achieve.

For animated dinosaurs and disasters, I kept the animations around 4 hand-drawn frames to preserve my sanity. The UFO, however, somehow inspired me to hand-animate a painstakingly detailed metal spinning sequence, which was about 9 frames long. To make matters worse, I realized that I had operated on the wrong scale and made the UFO too small. In order for it to be playable, it would need to be twice as large. Scaling up any art means filling in missing information, and with pixel art it means essentially quadrupling the work. Needless to say this was a long and painful ordeal for all 9 frames to be up-rezzed.

Looking back, I could have probably achieved a similar aesthetic with a painted look, and could have saved precious time. But seeing as graphics was our highest rated category this time around, maybe the struggles were worth it in the end.

~Rose (artist)

This time around, I had some external circumstances that kept me from really getting to the audio for a while, and basically just had one shot to come up with an audio theme. I ended up picking a lot of inspiration from the headbobbing dinosaurs. There were some ideas that I really wanted to do, like have separate tracks based on what disasters were active but just didn’t have the time to get to it in the end. The final song has the different tracks put together except the UFO track.

~Johan (musician)

looking back at our entries you’d see that every game we've made varied in its gameplay, art style, and feel. This contributes to the range in our scores and placement.

If you look purely at the placement, it doesn’t give you the big picture. It certainly feels like we were doing better in the earlier jams, consistently making top 50, while now we’re struggling to maintain top 100.

But when you look at the rating value, it tells a different story. Our early sub-50 placements were hardly hitting any 4s, while later we see higher and higher ratings throughout. The quality of our games continues to improve, and a couple drops here and there doesn’t reflect on our abilities, just something may not have vibed with the community.

And finally, we look at the percentile, which takes into account the total number of jam entries:

Out of 3576 entries, 776th place is still in the top 78% percentile. Still the worst overall out of our entries, but not as bad as it may feel! (Fun fact, there were exactly 776 entries back in LD27) It’s astounding seeing the growth of LD and the sheer number of amazing entries each time.

There's definitely an upward trend, as we learn and improve each time! We're trying new things faster, more efficient, and still having fun in the process. We learn new things and pick up new tools along the way. We engage more and more with the community and give back. Most importantly, we'll never stop creating. We'll never stop taking risks.

Thanks for reading!