Postmortem

My submission for the Godot Wild Jam (33) started rather spontaneous. The game jam started the Friday before (May 14th), but I read about it on Monday (17th) and got enthousiastic about doing another game jam.

This time I decided to work on it all by myself, instead of joining a group.

The theme was “You Aren’t The Hero”.

So I started brainstorming, wrote a lot of ideas on papers and at some point it looked like the idea of a wizard who had to aid a platform-hero to overcome specific obstacles would be the "winning" idea. But it just didn't felt fun enough ... and that's important when you want to quickly build something.

So after some more thought, I finally found THE idea - a hero would walk through a dungeon and your task is to build that dungeon. The hero will walk and fight himself, but you are in charge of his success, by making sure where the monsters, treasures or hearts will be placed.

Monday (17) I started with the generation of the rooms with randomized doors, so not every room would have the same amount and/or location of doors. And I finished placing the rooms on a grid.

On Tuesday (18) I made some designs in Aseprite and put those in the game. In the end I had something that looked a bit like what I had drawn:

The design in Aseprite

Wednesday (19) and Thursday (20) I worked on the ability to select rooms, preview them and be able to place them on the grid.

Friday (21) I added the finish-room (finally some goal to work towards) and did some tweaks on the look-and-feel.

Only two days to go and I had some base to work with ... but not much gameplay yet. And that's always the thing I like to have as soon as possible, something to play with ... so I can test and tweak if the game is as fun as I had envisioned.

The lack of progress was also due to the fact that I could only work on the game jam during my evenings, since I had to work my regular dayjob during the day.

Saturday (22) I made more progress:

• the hero walks through the dungeon all by himself
• draw an "opening" when 2 doors connect
• the hero would walk through the dungeon in a random order
• rooms would have different states (monster, treasure, empty, hearts) and handle their pickups

Sundag (23) was the last day and still there was enough to do. The deadline of 22:00 (10 pm) is looming and in the end I had finished a lot:

• your score gets calculated, based on the "steps" you took
• the health of the hero is tracked and you can "die"
• some visual tweaks, like the ground and grass
• added a splash-screen and main-menu

In the end I submitted my game 4 minutes before the deadline. 

Done!

Or not?

Aftermath

When I checked my game - shortly after the deadline - I noticed that some text was drawn through each other. During my last-minute tweaks I had - accidentely - dragged some text on top of some other text. So now the text was unreadable and useless.

I quickly fixed it and contacted the organisation of the game jam. Luckily they allow to upload fixes for game breaking bugs, so I could upload it and was happy with the end result.

End result

The rest of the week I didn't market my game enough, hadn't uploaded any screenshots and my logo was just text. So it attracted too less people and I only received 15 ratings in the end.

The game ended on the 48th place, out of 89 - so just around the middle.

What's next?

After writing this postmortem I got enthusiastic again by the whole concept of this game. I just want to continue working on it and make the game it could be. 

So, stay posted ^^