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Gamejam Postmortems

A topic by hell created Oct 24, 2020 Views: 333 Replies: 6
Viewing posts 1 to 4
Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

Hello fellow jam participants!

I hope you’ve been able to get some rest after the jam!

As this jam is aimed towards beginners I would like to invite you all to write post-mortem devlogs for your entries.

If you post a link to your entries bellow I will read them (when I have time) and try to come with feedback and/or questions.

Also feel free to ask questions in this topic.

Hope to see your devlogs :)

What is a postmortem?

A postmortem is a text to explain things that went well and things that went bad. When I write my logs I try to have good references to the problems and provide examples of things I learned.

Why write one?

In the beginning, you don’t really know what you don’t know. There are many aspects of game development and it is beneficial to share how you work. Which is more important than the actual result. When you improve the way you work, your results get better.

Even when you know a lot, you don’t know everything there is to know.

I don’t know what to write.

Try to write a bullet-style list of things that either went well or bad and then expand on them with some more detail! It can be hard to try to get your ideas across.

Submitted

Obligatory link to my own postmortem devlog https://hellman.itch.io/sabba/devlog/189571/gamejam-postmortem

Submitted

I'm not quite sure how to write a postmortem myself, but I think I'll share it here what I've learned from this jam.

1. Doing the animations without references, can take an immense amount of time. Was reluctant to use references to stay "original/creative", but really, in the end it's basic movement, one way or another it's going to look similar.

- Cons? Takes a tremendous amount of time, and it may not look good, then making it public for feedback, you fix it accordingly and it looks good,, but it also looks like the thousands of references you'll find online.

- Pros? You sort of end up getting quite comfortable with the animation tools that you're using (my case - Godot, setting keyframes etc), You'll also be able to produce animations that are in your head more easily after this exercise. (So I don't regret the time spent)

But for a game jam, you probably don't want to be stuck on these for a long time. It took me around 3 days to get the basics done, running, jumping, sliding. Then an extra 2 days for Falling, Landing, Crouching.. It did pay off in the end though.

2. Sound Effects takes a long time (if you're not doing it yourself), I've never done it myself, so I can only imagine it being faster. I procrastinated sounds till the last day. I thought I could just easily download some free sfx and put into the game. While that's true.. what I didn't know, is that is hard to find the "suitable" sound for your game. Overall took me about 6 hours to get half of the sfx that I needed for my game.

And also, learn a bit about your audio editing software, you'll find out that is quite easy to do the essentials...

3. Simple > Complicated.

I've implemented a "new / revolutionary / patent-pending " mechanic that sounded sophisticated at first, it was so new, that it just confused all the players who tried it. Not only that, it was hard to code it, hard to explain and understand how it works, and not very well received.

Ended up replacing with something extremely simple, something that every was familiar instead. Result? Easier to code, and comments about how weird / confusing it was, were just completely gone.

4. Experiment, experiment and experiment...

You'll never know, sometimes your greatest ideas just come from experiments, specially if you're failing to do/create something that you want, but doesn't quite have the idea formulated.

This is for now ;P

Submitted

Very nice.

If you do another gamejam, what changes will you implement to your ways of working?

Sounds like you found out you should keep it simple. (Which is a great thing to do in my opinion)

Submitted

If I could work like the last few hours before the submission, I can't imagine how much I'd have accomplished..

these were the questions that went through my mind during those times:
Is this important?

Am I confident that I can make this, how long will it take?

How much value does it add to game?

Is there nothing else more important / better / simpler than this?

Any good alternatives at all?

These were asked in no particular order, but asked all the time...

With time running out, and a thousand ideas, I had to make the best choices that I could. , after each task completed, time just get shorter and shorter, so these questions matters even more...

During the last 24 hours, I've fixed some control issues (based on feedback), added sound, an early "level system" to make it gradually harder, and 1 new enemy. These things would've probably taken me 3-4 days under normal circumstances, but I got it done under 24 hours.. make it work! make it presentable, not too ugly, and ship it.. there's no time to make it perfect.. just get it done! now! 

I don't recall the order in which I've implemented these, but it sure were ranked by how important it was (at that time of thinking).

Ideas just seems to pour in at the wrong times, without a tight/real deadline, I'd have normally gone and started working on the first one that came to mind, could be working on it for 1 week, just to realize it wasn't that good after all.

But this is of course, just an "ideal". To really do it, I've already failed since the submission day ended .. :P

Procrastination and thousands of excuses pour in at the wrong times as well. haha

Conclusion? found an ideal work-philosophy, but meeh .. so hard.. :P

Submitted

I've made my first devlog video here : 

It was an amazing experience!
Submitted (1 edit)

Very good video, nice explanation of the problems you faced.

What software did you use for sharing online drawings?

We used something similar in my team but more for designing flowcharts, https://miro.com

I use this for work (Software Engineer) as well and I like it a lot for brainstorming.

It’s also a good way of communicating your ideas for game mechanics to the other team members.