Peak Oil Post Mortem - Oils well that ends well.
When presented with a choice on Saturday morning between a code heavy or an art heavy game, I chose to go for the code heavy option. I am not a coder by trader, so I probably would have done a better job of the art heavy game, but the thought of spending hours fiddling with animated sprites didn't excite me the way fiddling with numbers did.
The final game is a economic management game, where you prospect for oil, build wells, and manage production to make money. It's made in Unity and is made solely with Unity's UI engine. The small amount of art was made in Inkscape.
Unfortunately, I ran out of time to implement a fairly major feature I wanted - an events system. I really wanted the game to have flavourful events that pop up every minute or so - such as an outbreak of war or a market crash - that affected the game world significantly. Without them the game is a bit monotonous and dry, sadly, but I would have needed another day and it would have become a Jam rather than a compo entry.
I would have also have liked to spend some time tweaking the numbers to make the game more balanced (it's easy to get stuck in an upward or downward spiral), adding clarity to the UI and adding sound, but such is the nature of a 48 hour event! I wouldn't say the game is "fun" exactly, but it's a big achievement for me, as I have never done the solo LD compo before, nor done a game jam as a coder.
