What a ride. This was definitely one of the most fun Compo experiences I had. Wanted to write up an initial post-mortem a day after the Compo ended, and then I'll do another one after playing other people's games and seeing the results.
First things first, I made a game! And I'm really happy with the result. Check out Bartleby in Space here
During theme voting, I saw the theme Space Exploration and really liked it (apparently I was the only one). I thought up this idea about an astronaut that you moved by thrusting through zero-g space, who would go on adventures and meet strange creatures. Then when the theme was announced, I initially thought I'd have to come up with something new. But in brainstorming, I thought about oxygen as a currency, realized it could be perfect for a space game, and my concept was reborn, this time with a time-sensitive element.
The first night, I was able to get almost all of the core systems up and running, which was hugely helpful going into the second day. Movement, interacting with NPCs, and the map screen were all sorted within a couple of hours (I'm in LA, so this was between 7 (had to see Endgame first) and 11 pm or so). The map proved to be key in particular, since I hadn't initially thought of it but realized it was the key to make the game playable so you aren't perpetually lost. I was ahead of schedule significantly, so I made most of my NPC art assets that night.
Day 2 was going to be all about creating a full game from start to finish. I ran into some road blocks due to not being an exceptional programmer. Because the whole game is built around your inventory and NPCs particular wants, there needed to be a system to check what items you have, check what items the NPCs want and are offering in exchange, and display all that information to a text box. I really struggled to build something elegant and ended up hardcoding a ton of values in an inventory array. It wasn't pretty, but it did eventually work. Which I guess is a decent lesson for a game jam: if you can't get it done right, get it done somehow.
I got to play around with some new features in Unity as well, particularly the UI Canvas and Text Mesh Pro, which I had never used before. They were pretty easy to pick up, which turned out to be great for me because I think it added a high level of polish to the trading quests.
By around 10 pm that night I had a fully playable quest line. I was then able to dive into the start and endgame flow, with time to give it some nice fades and decent UI. I sort of fell into a zone that night, which was incredibly productive but led to me staying up til about 4 am, which I generally try to avoid.
Day 3 was all about audio and crushing bugs. I no nothing about making music, so I used an auto-generator and some basic bfxr. Maybe for next time I will try to learn something so that I can make simple music. Especially because its a space game, I imagine it would be relatively easy to create a simple, ethereal backing track, but I wouldn't even know where to start right now.
I ran into one final problem in my final playtesting: because of how I built the UI, the game only works in 16:9. No problem, just force Unity to only play in that aspect ratio. Except Mac wasn't respecting that. So for now, there is no Mac build. But I did add a WebGL version so hopefully Mac users can still play it.
All in all, it was a great compo, mainly because I think I scoped appropriately from the beginning and came up with a concept that played to my strengths (art and writing) while minimizing my weaknesses (the programming was relatively simple and the movement system was basic).
This was also my first experience streaming, and I had a lot of fun. I plan to stream more in the future and plan to stream myself playing and rating games. So if you want to come by twitch.tv/carlsonandpeeters, I'll play any game sent to me in the chat.
Congrats to everyone who participated, and hope you are all resting now. Looking forward to playing so so many games over the next three weeks.
Best,
Jack M.
