So, it’s time for a post-mortem, I guess. Not that game’s dead or anything, but I do suppose they are interesting to make. I’ll start by thanking everyone that tested or might test Le Petit Shooter, the game we made this LDJam. It was my first LD, and only my second Jam. Most of the team had a little more experience in those, so there’s that. That being said, let me make a few considerations on what we built.

The Cons

Drunk people enjoy drinking – I, as the manager and jam host, started it all by messing up and giving shelter to 2 drunken friends (which, in my defense, weren’t drunk by the time I gave them shelter) at the start of the jam. They stole the artist’s laptop to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race and overall went around being drunk and bothering people while they were trying to work. It was fun, tho, and we still laugh about it. I mean, I’m making fun of them right now, so there’s that. Also, when they sobered up, I managed to use them as balance testers for the game’s mechanics, so it was a decent tradeoff.

Build it and they will come, except they didn’t - we had 2 more people that were going to work with us, which would make the amount of people raise from 5 to 7 developers (me included, even though I didn’t develop anything at all). One of them dropped out because of connection issues (he was remote), and the other disappeared in a Deadmau5 concert and never showed up at all (he was also remote). While the first one was on the programming team, and we did quite nicely with 2 programmers, the second one was supposed to be a graphic artist. That overloaded our already overloaded solo artist who was struggling on a workstation that wasn’t his, and we can say art department worked in decent conditions for only a day and a half (which you can notice by the fact some of the Unity assets ended up showing in the final jam build).

It’s just too big – As the jam progressed and our developers were getting tired, one of them decided to rest from the necessary work by expanding the project’s scope and doing stuff that wasn’t originally planned. We had to, then, rebalance the project accordingly so the new functionalities would be seamlessly integrated to the already existing functionalities. That generated a lot of extra content and combat diversity, but may have generated a few glitches and issues on some machines that we couldn’t anticipate because we had little to no time to check and fix them. Some issues we detected are that, in some machines, you won’t be able to ride bullets, jumping above someone’s head will create a strange flying collision glitch, and sometimes the game plays a little slower than it was supposed to. We fixed them after the jam ended, and you can check the most recent build to check how it was supposed to work by following this link.

Not that small – We had planned to end the game’s development by Sunday night, because we thought the jam would be over by then. One of our programmers even had classes the following day. When we noticed that we had a whole extra day, team was already exhausted from overworking. While we could add a lot of the final artwork you see on the build we have, programming and bugfixing took a hit because of that.

Two people hindsight harder than one – This one’s kinda obvious, and we actually noticed it by the jam’s start, but we decided to go for it anyway: creating a multiplayer-only game for a jam is a bad idea. Not because development has to be more polished or stuff, but simply because it’s harder to test and evaluate the game. I mean, if you are reading this by yourself, you’ll probably be sad by now because you lack someone else to test it (but if you do have someone, please test. It’s really fun. I know, I’ve tested it for half the jam’s duration, until it became fun). We knew it, but we went for it anyway because a jam is also a time when you try doing something you want to do.

As you can see, we had quite a few problems, and they were mostly my fault, which means I’m not a good manager yet. Sorry, still learning. Now, let’s talk about something else.

The Pros

The Team – Holy s*, the team. I mean, look at all the issues we had. Now look at the final result, made in 72 hours. We’re goddamn proud of ourselves. Programming team was top notch, and would solve issues that were considered to be 3-4 hours long in 30 minutes most. Graphic art was made by only one person in half the jam’s duration. SFX are all original and composed for the jam by our musician (the 5th member that I didn’t mention until now because it was completely issueless). If I were a little less of a failure of a manager we’d probably have a complete MMO in 72 hours (laughs).

The Game - We enjoyed creating it. Jams are supposed to be fun, at least, and boy did we have fun. We enjoyed so much doing it that we are still working on it, so if you want to check up later on how it’s wrapping up, I assure you that your time won’t be wasted. Visuals and sound are gorgeous and our artists really captured the essence of Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince and Mexican Standoffs and mixed them in an improbable but fine mix.

The Balance – A general rule of management is to get the worst possible situation and make the most of it. Two drunk people are probably as bad as a situation can get. Two sober dedicated alpha testers are way better than you could expect from the start. Both were also fighting/smash game dedicated players, so that also helped to get everything rounding up the way we wanted it to go.

The scope expansion – Sure, it’s never good to work more than you anticipated, especially if that extra work generates extra bugs. However, more features do also make the gameplay better, and still having stuff to do is one of the reasons we decided to keep working on a full build of this game and releasing it later. Expect a few more friends to show up as playable characters, and a lot of extra content.

The experience – Even though I’m not new to playing and studying videogames, I’m new to this whole concept of creating videogames. So was one of our programmers and our graphic artist. The 3 of us started doing stuff like this together in the last GGJ. The musician and the lead programmer already worked on other full games, and you could tell that by watching the amount of time they took to create stuff from scratch. After these two jams and with a project on the works, I suppose there’s only one maxim that works on this field:

“Just like, make game.”

If you reached it down here, you’re a hero. I’m not sure how I ended up here in the first place. Thanks for reading our post-mortem, and try Le Petit Shooter with a friend.

The Development Team