Sam covered most of the issues in our project in her write-up.  I wanted to talk a bit about the mechanics and how they evolved fairly chaotically.  Most of our ideas were “flavour first” as in they were inspired by the setting rather than invented to fulfil a mechanical purpose.  When we came up with the concept we were saying things like “maybe something ridiculous happens like the cinema gets attacked by bees or a giant snowman” rather than “what combination of interactions would provide an interesting challenge”.  We talked about having an intermission, adverts and a newsreel like in real-world 1940’s cinema so that we could inject some narrative into it and tell a bit of a story.  I wanted to have that classic trailer horn sound accompanied by a giant silhouette of a snowman projected over the audience!  What we ended up with was something a bit more abstract and puzzley akin to zoo-keeper.  If we’d decided early on that this was essentially a puzzle game I think we would have spent more time trying to come up with column/row interactions and then pulling a bunch of relevant real-world explanations out of our asses.  We might have also made something less confusing!  But then on the other hand we might have lost some of the style and charm which has received some good feedback so to be perfectly honest I’m quite glad we didn’t do that and instead decided it would be cute if there were bunnies with long ears

One thing we’re going to continue to do in future jams is make sure we have somebody working on sound effects!  It makes a world of difference adding appropriate music and sound effects to a game and I think the most noticeable change when we realised the game was suddenly going to be fun to play was the first time I ran the game after adding Becky’s sound effects.  So adorable!  Also without the music we wouldn’t have come close to conveying the mood we wanted would we?  <3

There’s still a fair few bugs we’re aware of and the clutter on the screen is definitely a bit of a situation overload but I’m really happy with what we managed to create!  In the meantime I’m enjoying playing other people’s entries and seeing lots of interesting concepts come out of a very difficult theme! -x-

~~~~RATE AND PLAY~~~~~