Took longer to get around to this than I thought!

The Theme

As part of rating themes during the final rounds I usually jot down ideas for each theme if I can so that I have some idea of what I can do right from the start. I was actually pretty excited when Summoning won since I had a pretty clear idea in my head of what I wanted to do. Plenty of other people went with other meanings of "summoning" which was great to see.

What Went Right

• I blitzed through most of the static art in one morning and in general I think the art turned out pretty well. The enemy popping effect and the cars are my favorites!
• Basic game-feel. It's was important to me that any challenge would come from decisions the player makes and the actions they take, not fighting against unresponsive controls or wonky collision. I might make a post with some tips since I do see some submissions neglect to do things like normalizing player input which are quick, easy fixes.
• Barebones risk-reward combo meter. It's enough that once there's some cop cars you need to start taking opportunities to smack carrots to refresh your meter. Nothing amazing but without it I think the baseline scoring would be pretty boring.
• Extra features. Was pretty easy to rework previous settings and controls rebinding stuff I had, which I think helps add a layer of polish.
• I already have a kinda-engine on top of SDL2 with a lot of convenience and features built in. (I even recently made a dialog system but not had chance to use it yet!) I'm extremely comfortable in it and feel very productive. It's a big help in being able to get something out in the timeframe. And the code is GPL3, although I've not bothered to make a public repository for it or anything - maybe I should at some point.

What Went Wrong

• I had been working on a different physics system using verlet integration before the jam and completely forgot I hadn't done frame-independent friction for it. So half way through I had to yank all that out and just go with simple euler and AABB collision, after I wasted time trying to rush and hack together a solution. Was really frustrating.
• My weekend ended up not being super productive after getting the art and basics in. I probably got 75% of the game done in a marathon session on Monday.
• The leafy-brain carrots were originally either going to psychically attack the player or levitate around to introduce either more risk or add some complexity to gathering and juggling carrots. I just didn't get time to do them. Without them I do think the game misses a layer of interesting gameplay.
• Some of the animations are kinda stiff or I had to reuse for time. I didn't get player dashing or hurt animations done for example. Simple trade offs of time versus getting other things done.
• Post-submission I've been distracted with other things and sickness, so I've been slacking on rating other games and really participating. Next time I think it would be good to dedicate a little bit more time for some interesting 'my game is up!' material, follow up posts for exposure and having time set aside to rate others. In generally I'm very bad at advertising my own things, but also I've been missing out on going through all the amazing submissions people have done.

Next Time

• The last two jams I've been pretty safe with gameplay. Next time I want to focus a bit more on coming up with something different and interesting as a starting point.
• I try to do as much as I can myself with art, programming, sound effects but I'm always relying on others for music. I'd love to try learning some music theory and make an attempt next jam to create at least one piece of music.

I don't think my account is trusted so I can't seem to post links in these (or at least they get gobbled up when I preview this), so if you'd like to check out Crimes Against Carrots please click on my name to view my submissions! Thank you for everyone that's commented and rated so far!