Hi everybody!

This game jam has been eye-opening for me. I had a lot of fun and I learned a lot of stuff in the meantime. Stuff about what went right and what went wrong. Below a summary:

Have one or two 'Blackboxtesters' Yes, that's a real term for testers who don't know anything about the product they are testing. I did not have any of those. My wonderful girlfriend has been test playing all weekend long and I also had friends helping out tremendously. However, they knew the concept of the game. So small details that could be mistaken for bugs were perfectly logical for them. For instance: after submitting the game a lot of you thought that the autumn level had a bug where the player would shift to the left or right. My 'test team' knew about the wind-feature in that level and so did not even think once that it could have been mistaken as a bug.

Polish polish polish Another thing I realized is that a game is more fun to play if there is a catchy jingle playing in the background and if there are more fun background graphics to look at. These things did not have priority for LD47. A lot of the feedback given by the community is that there is a lack of music/background graphics.

Plan time to implement given feedback I got a lot of awesome feedback from all of you. However, I don't really have time to make a second version of the game implementing all the feedback. Next time I'll plan a day in the weekend after submission to implement all the feedback :-)

Getting the game mechanics right soon By spending the majority of the first day fine tuning the characters' movement I did not have to think about that the rest of the time. Ok, the jumping in my game feels a bit strange in hindsight, but i'm very happy with it. And I'm happy spending the first part of the jam doing that task. It resulted in reaching my milestone on schedule: getting a working prototype within 8 hours after staring development.

More than one season of playtime At a party my girlfriend and I have been thinking about the time it would take to play CRYSOPHOLIST all the way through. In theory all the levels are infinate, but I set a hard limit to 1024 screens per level for performance reasons. We calculated it like this:

Every screen takes approximately 5 seconds to play we thought. Every time you end a level, the next level gains a screen to play. So the first time playing a level you will have one screen, the second time two screens, etc.

The formula for this is: (1024 * (1024+1)) / 2 = 524800 screens per level to play

Every screen takes approx. 5 seconds: 524800 * 5 = 2624000 seconds

There are 4 levels: 2624000 * 4 = 10496000 seconds

Seconds to minutes: 10496000 / 60 = 174933

Minutes to hours: 174933 / 60 = 2915

Hours to days: 2915 / 24 = 121

Days to weeks: 121 / 7 = 17

Days to months: 121 / 30 = >3 months!

After those 3 months you can still play infinitely, but the levels won't get bigger anymore. If you have not played it yet and want to take it for a spin you can visit it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/crysophilist