Jam portmortem

Now that the Godot Wild Jam #41 is over and results are in I wanted to take a moment and write a post mortem of how the jam went for me. The game didn’t do too well and ranked 65th overall but it was to be expected as I missed most of the marks of what the rankings consists off.

Successes

• Managed to submit something playable which is a success in my books.
• The concept and idea for the game was pretty solid and based on feedback the minimalistic user interface worked particularly well the way it is.
• Learned a couple of neat new tricks & tools to add into the game development toolbox for the future.
• Didn’t encounter any show stopping obstacles at any point (or at least managed to work around them).
• Identified some assets that could be made into reusable assets for future to save some time not remaking them for every jam.
• Got an idea to start a world building project to tie the games I intend to make into single world and lore (interested to see how this works out).
• Got a little familiarity with the Godot Wild Jam community over Discord. Seems like a welcoming and encouraging community to do jams with and I’m very pleased to have found it.

Failures

• Gameplay loop is incomplete. It’s rather unsatisfactory to play knowing there is no end goal. It’s also very unsatisfactory to submit something you know is unfinished but simply run out of time to do anything else.
• Over scoped the game feature which lead to above mentioned unfinished gameplay and the missing polishing of the game.
• There’s no accessibility options in the game (other than the toggle sound effects) and one of the crucial parts of the game is relying purely on audio which is pretty bad for accessibility considerations.
• Stressed a little from the project. I want these jams to be relaxing and fun short projects rather than crunching for something overly complicated game.

All in all it was fun project but I really need to come up seriously less complex ideas in the future in order to get completed and polished games submitted. Over the nine days that the Godot Wild Jam lasts I think I can put maximum of 20 hours into making it and that really means I need to put bit spare time I have into it. So probably 10 hours is a more realistic estimate of the amount of time I can put in without it feeling too stressful.