So, my dear game is finally done! It's been crazy, and when I got the idea of making a whole text-based adventure game alone in Java I thought 'well, do what you can for the Compo and call it a day'. But the Compo came and I felt like I could do much more, and indeed here it is - The Quest for the Botijo. I encourage you all to try it when you can, and I'll write my post-mortem tomorrow since it's 2AM at my local time and tomorrow's going to be hard enough as it is. Cheers!

_This is a post-mortem for my Jam game, "The Quest for the Botijo". You can check it out here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/$24133 _

So I've finally had some sleep after the jam, and after a completely fruitless day yesterday I think I can start to act like a person again.

When I started the jam on Friday, I thought about making a text-based adventure game in Java for the Compo. This went only half-well, because I massively underestimated the difficulty of making such game in Java. Furthermore, there were some other stuff that I kinda wanted to do during the weekend, and said to myself "you control Java pretty well, surely it can't be that bad so as to have to dedicate to it exclusively, surely you can do it in 5h tops". Oh boy was I wrong.

What went right

I first kney of the jam through my beautiful, brilliant, fantastic group of friends from my city's gamedev community. They were hosting a local event in a cozy little place, and although I initially wasn't going to go (due to the whole having to do other stuff during the weekend thing), I finally decided that I'd better go and see them, if only for a couple of hours. This was on Saturday, and game development appeared to be well underway, and I didn't carry my laptop, and seeing them there made me decide that on Sunday I was definitely bringing my laptop and staying for a bit longer. I did have a blast there, because let's face it, there are few things that are better than doing what you love with great people.

In the strictly gamedev department, I can say that command recognition did go much better than expected, and I definitely expected this to be the hardest part to make. I can't say I've done a perfect job, but for the time I could give it, I'm extremely proud of it. I'm also quite glad to have had the chance of making a whole game just in Java, because as a software engineering student it's a language that I had started to consider a purely 'serious business' one, and I kind of needed to prove to myself that it can be for funsies too.

What went wrong

Despite my being quite happy with the result, I can't say I expected this game to suck up so much time. I wanted to get some uni work done, and my planning for the weekend gave me about 6-7h for it, of which I could only squeeze in 30min when I felt my head was about to burst from trying to take twenty different approaches at once for a specific game feature. I ended up procrastinating from "procrastination" doing actual work, which I guess is kind of cool.

About Java, at first I thought I could do a true command-line application, but soon I realized I was developing in Spanish and CMD is quite unhappy with non-ASCII. That meant tildes and our very own letter 'ñ' had a pretty tough time rendering correctly if the encoding was off, which I didn't have the gut to get into. Instead, I decided I'd go for a Swing/AWT (I still get them mixed up) application, which meant I could now insert images and the like. Well, I thought I could, and it took me until yesterday morning, with a whole day in the US of the game having been up, to realize not fonts nor images were being shown. So, in class, I had to look a couple of things up and quickly fix it. Luckily no one had downloaded it yet.

Besides this couple of things, however, I'd say things went smooth on this one, considering a friend of mine had their HDD die on her in the GGJ. She was able to publish the game, but if that's not a major problem I don't know what is.

What I learned

This jam has served me to learn much stuff about Java I didn't know. I had never used Swing/AWT before, and I'm definitely using it again sometime because it was surprisingly easy to use. I've also learned about game worldbuilding (and planning on paper before implementing), and a lot of other things I can't even enumerate at the moment.

So yeah, this jam has been wonderful because it's let me make a game I'd been quite willing to do for a long time, with puns centered around and intended for my group of friends, and a general ton of fun, to be honest. It's been great, and I'm definitely in for the next one ^^

Keep an eye on yur botijos! :smiling_imp: