Review of my own compo entry: "ItGrows"

Hello i am the dev of the little compo entry called "ItGrows". One of the 18 people who played this game of mine may remember it and prolly remember it being very mediocre. So lets get into it i will be discussing the game in the following segments(seperated with game screenshots). 1.Development 2.Reception 3.Personal rating

Jamgame meme.PNG 1. Development It grows was made in a very short time between around 8-10 hours total there are 2 reasons for this 1. I had work saterday removing a big chunk of time i had to make the game(about 10 hours total) lastly is the switching of engines ItGrows originally was gonna be made on Unity but after running into some trouble(which mainly comes from me being a sucky programmer). As such after a goodnight sleep i switched to Clickteam Fusion 2.5(an engine i am much more experienced with) and while switching engines midjam is generally a bad idea i felt(and still do) that this was one of the times where i benefited from it sadly my time on unity was still wasted. After switching to clickteam i made quick progress but i failed to include many things that i wanted to(like better ai, more gameplay, environment pieces and tank tread trails) half of these to be honest had less to do with actual difficulty and more to do with not feeling like doing more art(which honestly i regret now knowing how much it would have improved the product but whats in the past is in the past). I did however have time to make 2 of my friends playtest my game which is why my original release had both the 1.0 and 1.1 version to choose from with the 1.1 version being post playtesting.(and adding a few more paths and a waypoint back to the landing pad after collecting all the items) ITGROWSscreen2.PNG 2. General reception. The general reception was surprisingly positive although there were criticisms which i already knew about or can agree with in hindsight. Ill list them all below.

  1. Wall bounce is very annoying. (while i personally didnt find it annoying with reflection i can see how it can be a turn-off for alot of people)
  2. Lack of clarity (this one specifically is one i really kicked myself for, for comitting the 3 big tutorial sins: -1. no ingame tutorial. -2. All is explained in chunks of text -3. The tutorial is optional despite me knowing damn well everyone(including me) will skip it that way)
  3. Camera too zoomed in(this is the one point i do disagree with the camera zoomed in is because the game was made in the same resolution as the gameboy itself which i did for authenticity to the artstyle, i also feel it adds a degree of tention to the game).
  4. fuzzy graphics (yeah clickteam does that with scaling its weird).
  5. Theme isnt very clear (yeah i have no explanation for this one i am just an idiot and only added the monster growing every 10 seconds part in the description like 3 days after voting began) ITGROWSscreen3.PNG
  6. Personal rating. While i am quite proud of this game and i consider it in my top 3 best games(which might be considered sad but idc) along with golden cavern and duelitten i do however recognize that this game is far from perfect at best i consider it a short fun time-waster at worst an annoying mediocre mess. So what would be my scoring if i gave it one?

Fun - 3,5 (i can enjoy my time with this game because its right up my alley being a themed short and sweet horror game afteral)

Innovation - 2 (its your standard horror game shlock you are being chased and are on a fetch quest like 99% of horror games ill give it a bit of credit for some unique monster mechanics and tank controls which you dont see alot of anymore)

Theme - 3 (the theme certainly is there but it isnt really noticeable unless the monster is right up your behind the entire time)

Graphics - 3,5 (eventough there arent alot of environment pieces i am actually a really big fan of the games artstyle but it could have definetly benefited from more artwork)

Audio - 2,5 (the music changing with the items collected is fun but ugh the main menu theme and the theme for when you only have 0-1 items collected are so bad tbh)

Humor - 3 (i actually think the worm looks goofy as hell so i find them very entertaining to look at xD)

Mood - 4 (the one thing i think the game truly excells at is the frantic tension of the race to collect items while being chased and making it really seem like a GB game)

Overal - 3 (its serviceable but not anything special)