Skip to main content

Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines

One Week Left! What If You Don't Make It On Time? Sticky

A topic by Tim Krief created Nov 23, 2021 Views: 204 Replies: 1
Viewing posts 1 to 2
HostSubmitted(+4)

Hi there!

Here's your friendly announcement that we are entering the last 7 days of the challenge. Don't panic. If you scoped things right and stick to your schedule, everything should work. But it's almost never the case...

If you feature creeped your project or just underestimated the amount of work necessary, don't feel bad about it. The more you experience this kind of things the better you can scope and plan in the future. For the time being, if you feel like you won't be able to deliver what you envisioned, it's totally normal (I would have been surprised otherwise). You might want to scope down, cut parts of your project and focus on polishing what works.

The goal is to make a complete game, but even releasing something, an early access version, a demo or a "chapter 1" would already be a huge success in itself. Try to release something but do not feel any guilt and, of course, do not crunch. Having a deadline is good, it forces you to work towards an intelligible goal, but remember that it's not the end of the world on December 1 (hopefully), your project will still be there and you'll still be able to work on it in the future, maybe during the next Crunchless Challenge, who knows?

Moving the goalpost is normal and way healthier than crunching. What we want is to keep a good memory of our work so that we have a great time and so that we'll be enthusiast about it if we want to touch it up!

Your work have been amazing so far! I have a hard time keeping up with it all but all the devlogs, tweets, updates, messages on discords etc. have been so great to check through the month. Keep it up and have a great last week!

PS: I've seen almost 30 people leaving the jam and although it's completely in the spirit of the challenge, I think that even if you really can't make it in time, you shouldn't feel like you "abandoned" the challenge. You participated like everyone else and worked on something like everyone else. You should write, and submit to the jam, a postmortem about what happened, be proud of what you achieved, and learn for your next projects.

People who try to run a marathon sometimes have to stop on the 10km mark, but they still ran a 10k!!!

Submitted(+1)

Hey pal, i left the challenge yesterday and then i found your message, so i decided to rejoin and deploy something because it was hard to stick to the schedule and still have something decent. The good point is, i learned that being health should be part of any challenge.
"Moving the goalpost is normal and way healthier than crunching" So that big and ambitious project is something i cannot do in a month working only 4 hours a week, but it's a wonderful time to start branding and set the new goals for it to keep on working until it becomes a sellable project.

Thank you