My game is done and submitted!

Here’s a quick post-mortem/summary on how things went. I’ll probably post some more detailed thoughts about how things went and what I learned later on my blog, but I’m posting here first to sign off on my submission and wrap things up.

The good:

• Feel – I’m really happy with how the visuals and the feel of moving the ship around and shooting turned out.
• Pacing – On Friday when the theme was announced, I spent 3-4 hours roughing out a concept. I slept on it, and then hammered away at it for about 10 hours on Saturday. A few more hours on Sunday (mostly audio work), and an hour’s worth of bug-fixing and polish today. This spread of hours across the weekend felt the most successful of any jam I’ve done before. I was never too tired/unfocused to work on the game, but I never felt overwhelmed with tasks. I guess I’m getting better at this part!
• Playtesting – This was the first time I posted WIP builds online during a jam, and the feedback I got from doing so really took the game to a higher level and kept me motivated. I did in-person playtesting as well, but getting feedback from different sources really helped keep things feeling fresh.

The bad:

• Difficulty Curve – Since all the weapons/enemies are random, difficulty doesn’t ramp up the longer you play. The result of this is new players sometimes feel overwhelmed, and experienced players get bored. This problem comes up in a lot of games I make, I’ll have to practice dealing with this specifically.
• Sound Effects – I fell back on using SFXR for the sounds, which is fine, but I’m going to make it a goal to get a bit more creative with audio than just bleeps and bloops next time.
• Unoriginality – At a glance, the game bears a lot of similarity to games like Geometry Wars, and the aesthetic is even pretty similar to a game I made previously called Return. I think I put enough unique elements into this game to make it worthwhile, but I still felt like I was using existing games as a crutch to prevent myself from having to make too many tough design choices. Next time I’ll challenge myself to deviate more freely from existing gameplay tropes/visual styles.

Now to give it a bit of time and think about what I’ve learned from doing this jam. Overall it was a very positive experience! Time to go rate some games