Inspiration

Usually when doing game jams, I keep a list of things that I want or have to do in my head, and I go with the flow. It's actually not that bad when I'm only doing the programming, because it's reasonably simple and it's what I'm most experienced in... but this time I decided to do COMPO, so I also had to consider visuals and audio, of which I know pretty much nothing. :smile: (I'm excluding game design, because to a large degree it happens on the stage before the planning. :shrug:)

Inspired by one of the game jam tips in @candlesan's video, I decided to do some proper planning - write down tasks, estimate them, split them into mandatory and optional.

How it helped

Initially I had 3 main ideas. After doing a 20 minute tasks+estimates pass on them, I got a much clearer view on the scope of each one, as well as which parts need more work, things that I've missed while it was all in my head, etc. That helped me choose which idea I want to go for, and gave me confidence that even if I've underestimated some stuff, I'll have enough time to do everything I consider mandatory, and complete the base game.

Also, once I got to the execution, I had a clear path of things I needed to do, and the order was rather obvious! It helped with staying motivated and on track!

Tools

I used WorkFlowy for my task list as I just love that tool, but one can use Trello, notepad (probably), some physical thing - whatever works best for you.

Approach

I started with brainstorming ideas. Once I got 2-3 that I'm reasonably interested in, I wrote them down in WorkFlowy and made sublists with the tasks, giving each of them a rough estimate. I delved deeper where it was necessary, added subtasks or more details, until I felt that all main things are covered.

After that, I started working on the tasks, and as I was doing it, I marked them with #indev and #done tags for easier visibility, and I also wrote down how much time they actually took, to validate my estimates and see where they're off, so I can do them better in the future.

The plan itself

Here's the "amazing" task list for my game :smile: (the "(real - X)" part is how much time a task actually took):

Conclusion

I hope this random post will be helpful to someone! :sweatsmile: I'm definitely going to do this again next jam and see how it goes! :slightsmile:

And here are some links to my game, its complete Unity project repo, and my website if you wanna see other stuff I've created! :blush: