I had to force myself to start writing this so it’s all fresh in my head, 2 lazy u kno? Post-mortems are important though. They help you reflect on your experience and really solidify what you want to do better next time, and they’re immortalized into the internet so you can read ’em over whenever you want. I’ll try to keep this more concise though.
This is my 7th game jam, and my 5th completed game. Wowow. I’m ready to start a bigger game soon, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes. This game jam was also my second collaboration, and my biggest collaboration yet. Mush did pretty much all of the graphics (aside from the burrito sprite, I know burritos more than anyone else would), and Kfaraday did the music.
What went wrong:
-Planning/scope: I’ve done lots of game jams lately, most of them being 7 days long, so when starting this game, the scope was pretty messed up, even though I’ve done 2 LDs before this. I planned on a procedurally generated dungeon crawler, with modular dungeons. The dungeons modules were read in from an image containing blueprints for a bunch of 16×16 rooms, and would piece them together. That part alone actually went pretty well, despite taking quite a while to implement. Right when I finished it and it worked, I sat back and thought, “Wait, since you only have 10 seconds to explore, how the hell is the player even going to see all this shit?”. I realized this the next morning. Nothing else was implemented, just the dungeon thing, so I stripped out all the junk and made it only use one module per floor. After some messing around and cleaning up, it worked out. At the same time though, I wasted half of day one, which would have really messed up the project if I were doing the 48 hour compo this time.
Aside from that, the game overall was a bit too ambitious. I wasn’t able to put in much character progression in the game at all, which it really could have used. I quickly made attack damage go up for each five burritos you’re holding, to make things a little more interesting, though I don’t think many people will really utilize it, also bombs spawn after floor 14 which is ok I guess.
Another thing this really impacted was my sanity. I knew this probably wasn’t going to get finished if I didn’t pull an all-nighter on the last day, and pulling all-nighters is THE WORST. You’re tired, you just want to stop working and pass out, but you can’t or your game won’t get finished, then that shitty feeling is attributed to your game, then every time you play it or open up the source you’re going to feel kinda shitty. It has happened to me lots of times. Really try to keep your scope sane, or you won’t be for very long.
–Not familiar enough with the toolset (again): I thought I learned my lesson from using Unity for my 7DFPS, but NOPE! Even though I learned a lot about Unity over the last few times I’ve used it, I know I could have done many, many things way faster if I knew the toolset better. Like damn, I pretty much learned how to implement an actor system which is integrated with GameObjects while doing THIS game jam. Guys, please don’t do that. I’m crazy and dumb. You can learn different tools any time you want, you don’t need game jams for that, what you DO need game jams for though is to learn more about game development itself, design and scope and gameplay, not “OH GOD WHY AREN’T THESE GAMEOBJECTS BEING DELETED UGHHH I HATE UNITY HOLY SHIT”. If you don’t know your tools super well, crack open a book on it, read through some sources or something. I plan on reading through a Unity book ASAP if one exists.
-Etc: The rest of the issues mostly came from scope, but I’m not sure I 100% if I like the weird semi/turnbased system. It’s a little hard to understand from the surface for some people, like rapidly tapping the slap button or the eat button, not knowing it’s sort of a turn based system and the turn executes every second. It was kind of like that for Room, where people would mash into enemies as if it were a normal turnbased roguelike, and never realize attacks happen per turn automatically when you’re adjacent to an enemy.
What went right:
-The game was finished: Does this even count? I guess it does. It’s my 5th finished game jam. Aw yeah. That’s 5 in a row. I wanna do MOOOORE.
-It was a good prototype: The next game is going to be a first person dungeon crawler thing too, so me and Mush figured it’d be good to make a first person dungeon crawler in Unity. LD was a pretty good and productive way to prototype a game. The best part is that since LD is such a big event, it’s great for getting tons of feedback. I learned a lot about what direction the next game is going to be in. I learned that I don’t really like that semi-turnbased system I often use, so the next game will lean either towards full turn based, or full action. If they’re mixed in the game, they won’t be in the same place. (e.g., turnbased battles and realtime movement, or the other way around). One thing that seems to be going well so far is that people really like how everything is synced with the music. I think that cohesion is something I can really use in future games. The only issue is making sure it’s perfectly synced.
-Everything else: Sorry if I seem to be getting lazy at this point. It’s way easier for me to reflect on the things I did wrong and how I can improve them, because most of the time the things that go wrong are more important to take note of, since a lot of what goes right is more luck and experience. Basically everything that went right is all the cool stuff about the game, its awesome mushart/mushgrafix, and the awesome kfaramusic.
Play it here.
