We made a puzzle game for this jam and people kept saying we should take it further so we might do.
I had a lot of fun this jam, interacting with streamers finally playing a lot of games (played ~60 games), talking about games, giving constructive feedback - it was a blast, and the game making of course, first time I made levels and it was awesome :D
Comparing it to my previous entries, the current one is the one with the best ratings:
Somewhat lower than the comments made us expect but still quite good.
And the most important thing:
What I have learned.
This jam made me actually understand how to make games in a new way xD
After 8 years of game devs, this is the first time I realized what it means to make levels and how a game should be structured, especially in comparison with my previous entries.
Until now I kept adding features until the time runs out, never polished anything and barely managed to upload it on time - having the build-progress-bar and upload-progress-bar side by side with the LD-Timer. It was always on the very last minute.
But efficient Game Dev is about combining reusable mechanics. Constantly introducing new things to the player without proper explanation is bad. Many players didn't understand the elevator I created in "Murder Loop" because it was never introduced, so this was a point where people got stuck and had to quit the game.
This jam lead to a change in the big game I am working on - because until now, every puzzle is something completely new. Somewhat like Outer Wilds (just without the planets, spaceship, ..) - while Outer Wilds is an awesome game, it's an insane amount of work and they where like 15 people working on this. We are just 2 devs. And even Outer Wilds did reuse mechanics for their puzzles. The sand planet has a bunch of puzzles all based on the raising floor.
Our game suffers from a lack of content and I suffer from fixing and polising things non-stop. When I polish the waterfall, only the waterfall looks better, this is one spot in the entire game, same with the pyramid, the scanner, the sci-fi machines, everything exists as single entity in the game, everything is unique. The same is true for the puzzle code. Each puzzle is completely different from each other puzzle. This way, we will never finish it, so we will create reusable mechanics (like in the jam game) which can then be polished and look good everywhere on the map. The puzzles we have now, will stay but we will fill the emptiness in our world with reusable elements, such as moving platforms and boxes to jump on. Like portal. They had what? 7 different mechanics? Portal, Moving Platform, Box, Button, Energy-Ball, Moving Wall, Turret. And made an entire game out of it. Portal 2 only introduced jump & speed-gain goo and made a whole second game out of it.
This jam, playing the different games, categorizing them based on efficiency and completeness may saved the big game we are working on.
