Alright, despite being confident yesterday I could get collision and pathfinding done with a hacky method that wouldn't take all day instead I've been stuck bugfixing it for hours and I'm ready to call this a failure. I think I'm 1-2 hours away from fixing the pathfinding and then I'd probably be up until 2am tonight before the game was ready to play. Instead I think I want to salvage the rest of my day before I'm back at work tomorrow.

In the past I have promised to finish up the game post-jam but in reality I don't find the time/motivation for that so this time I'm just admitting failure and moving on.

Here's the last screenshot of hybrid "turn-based real-time" strategy game. I finally got some proper art in so at least looks a lot better today:

So I had a streak of successful Ludum Dare's making narrative driven adventure games, but I stretched myself these past two to make strategy games. Both have failed and both for the same reason. I think with a more mechanically driven game you need to have the core of it playable and fun quickly and then be building on it all weekend. Although both times I did focus on getting the core gameplay up and running first, it wasn't fun on its own, and so I spent the rest of the weekend building more to try and make it interesting. Hoping it would all come together in the end.

So for future jams I'm going to take one of two paths: - Return to narrative adventure and puzzling solving games. They're my comfortable zone and I know what I'm doing there and can get it done fast. - Build something mechanical around a fun central core and don't try to add depth and complexity if the core alone isn't interesting already.

A humbling weekend especially as I'm now on a 2 jam losing stream. However it's all good learning for what will hopefully be future wins!