Post-Jam Postmortem

Hoo, boy. I hope everyone had a good jam! Let's talk about what we (well, I) learned.

To begin, I want to address the two main glaring issues the game was submitted with, and apologize profusely for anyone who had to suffer through either. First, the game didn't enjoy being resized - most elements ended up misbehaving or outright breaking if you alt-tabbed out and came back to the game. More importantly, however, the drag-to-select feature was absurdly off-center, to the point of being unusable. Both of these bugs reared their ugly head the moment I decided to resize the levels, and the screen. While attempts were made, I simply lacked the time and energy to fix those issues by that point.

That leads me to a brief story, of mistakes made and lessons learned.

I had the benefit of the full allotted time for the jam, but admittedly I wasted much time patting myself on the back and letting my priorities get misplaced. There was more than one day in which I would spend a couple of hours adding (overscoped) extra features like new animal variants, feel accomplished, and call it a day then and there - all the while telling myself "I've still got time, it's two weeks after all! Don't want to burn out early!". 

Ultimately, this attitude would culminate in staying awake working for 43 hours straight the last two days of the jam, trying to track down and iron out what seemed like an endless stream of bugs that came from adding levels. Without diving into the technical details, up to this point I had been testing everything in a small room, and been designing with assets at a smaller scale, intending to scale the game up, as well as make larger levels down the line (wHaT cOuLd gO wRoNg??).

I was able to get the game to a playable state, ended up rushing and slapping together the help screen and the ending/credits screens, and 
by some miracle, with two hours and forty-five minutes before the deadline, I rushed over to itch to submit. By some miracle, the upload and submission process went smoothly (did I mention this is the first time I've ever used itch, too?). I was, unironically literally, seeing code when I finally laid down to sleep.

Alas, I digress - back to the game and game jam.

While I'm thoroughly embarrassed by my final product, I'm immensely proud of myself for finishing my first-ever game jam. I recognize I definitely bit off more than I could chew with the genre selection, and I definitely over-scoped designing out things. It would have benefitted the game if I had prioritized the more critical features (i.e. cameras and resizing the rooms&window) before filling out the character roster. I'm writing this postmortem with a month of reflection time, and with the wisdom of another prototype game under my belt. I've already found my skills improving - finding more efficient methods of fixing similar problems that I faced in making ForestFoRTS. 

The experience, confidence, and momentum I found from this game jam is priceless. I knew halfway through the jam that I (and anyone else that participated) had already found victory in that regard, I sincerely believe that. I'm eternally grateful for the entire team behind this game jam, and for PirateSoftware. I, and countless others, wouldn't be pursuing our passion without Thor's heart and his ceaseless encouragement, and language fails to express my gratitude for everything he does.