This was quite an unusual jam for me. On Saturday morning, when I'd usually be hard at work getting started, I was in a car hearing to the Cotswolds for a caravan holiday. I had my ancient laptop and my external hard drive with me, managed to get an entry developed and published on time, and now, with the rating period nearing its end, it's time for my traditional post-mortem.

First, though, I'd like to say a massive thank you to everyone who has played Super Jump Guy so far, and left such great feedback! If you haven't played it yet, please do, and I will play yours in return.

What Went Well

• I've finally gotten the hang of playtesting, and making sure all the bugs and edge cases are ironed out before I publish. The collision detection issues that plagued me in previous jams are essentially gone, and nobody has reported any glitches, which is fantastic to hear.
• Even better: I've finally learned how to use PICO-8's music tracker! After putting it off for 2 1/2 years, it wasn't even that hard in the end! As a result, Super Jump Guy has not one, but two full-length songs, plus a full suite of sound effects. It's amazing how much difference a decent soundtrack can make to a game.
• The simple fact that I was able to, for all intents and purposes, program two wildly different games within my shortened time limit, and well within PICO-8's resource limits, and while in a caravan in the middle of nowhere with a terrible Internet connection! This was probably my most ambitious LD entry to date, and I'm immensely proud of myself for being able to pull it off.

What Went Badly

• While I did manage to pull it off, I still can't help feeling like I overscoped a bit. I had to rush the game in a few places because I feared I was going to run out of time to get it all done. The lack of background detail is the most glaring example: I was going to add some proper parallax backgrounds and then I just kinda... didn't.
• I've already had at least one review criticising the forced multiple playthroughs, which I knew would be a problem. Yes, looping is the whole point of the jam, but playing the exact same level four times in a row is still not going to be the most exciting thing in the world. I was also concerned that Jump Guy's meta-commentary might lean too far towards "criticising the player for doing something that the game is forcing them to do", which is a ludonarrative technique that I hate, but I think (hope) I managed to avoid that.
• Overall, it feels a bit barebones in places. There's not enough variety. This is a concept that's begging to be fleshed out more than I could do in just 72 hours.

What Comes Next

I've already released an update to Super Jump Guy to improve some of the graphics and sound effects, and optimise some of the back-end code. I have a couple more graphics tweaks in the pipeline - some of which you can see in the GIFs above - and post-jam I intend to update the final section to refine its mechanics a little.

I believe this is worthy of being expanded into a full game, and I already have an idea for how it would work. I'd have to use a different game engine, as PICO-8's limitations don't give me much room for expansion, and I'm wary to commit myself to it in case I end up abandoning it after two weeks like the other game dev projects I've started this year.

So the best way forward from here is for me to create a full-size game in PICO-8. I think I've finally gotten good enough at using it that I can tackle such a project, and once I have that under my belt, I can start to think about tackling a larger project such as Super Jump Guy. Baby steps.