Now that our entries are out there in the wild, I thought it would be fun to hear how it went for you guys?

Personally, I started out in good style by forgetting everything about the jam, and only remembering it on July 9, thus losing a day. My devlog for July 9 was "Started this project. Gonna fail the jam, know I will." and for July 10 it was "Wow, so gonna fail!!!" but things kind of picked up after that.

I originally wanted the player to switch size via world_scale, but the small size caused some screwup, so I abandoned this, instead hardcoding each dollhouse scale platform to adjust the position of their true-scale twins.

As research, I watched https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfX6C2dxVyLxXl3gJwakzdqRaV7WKlqFR and learned how to add UI, pick things up and jump. I also got too anoyed with the awkward physics, and finally tried out Jolt. Worked straight away. For some reason the player was suddenly dollhose scale like I originally intended. No clue why, but I got rid of it by setting world_scale of the player to 1.0 at startup.

Boosting the jump height to something pretty overpowered really improved the experience. I think this is a general truth in VR; having more physical provers than in real life simply feel empowering.

When the deadline finally arrived I was plenty beat, but satisfied I had something ready. And then, the deadline was expanded to what was actually promised! My brain simply refused to do any more work, but in the end, I got it to give the game a few more updates. I made the player body no longer collide with the pickup object (turned out to be a massive improvement), added some traps and adjustable starting position and fiddled with the lighting and visuals. The trailer still shows the state of the game at the first deadline.

So, what's your story?

The Jolt physics engine is great. I also used it in my game. 

I was really proud of myself for not falling into the dreaded "scope creep". I actually ended up expanding on my original idea when I found an extra day or two! It definitely didn't come without incident though. My dev log shows a pretty drastic morale swing when I was struggling with some UI elements (the HUD specifically). 

I only had the knowledge and capability to test my game for the Quest. I'd love to figure out a way to at least emulate other systems so I can be more confident in their release builds. Speaking of release builds, I only uploaded debug builds because my release build process was missing signatures and keys. That seemed like a task that wasn't going to get done in time for the deadline, so I didn't even attempt to fix it. 

It was a lot of fun! This is my first public game jam and I feel like I learned a lot in the process.

I planned out what I wanted to do on Wednesday, and then didn’t end up starting until Friday night, so I basically had two productive panic sessions, one per deadline. Saturday was definitely more productive than today, but the deadline extension was welcome and helped me refine the experience a bit.

Favorite feature I implemented was a haptic rumble for when you have a fish on the line, rather than a visual or audio cue. It feels very natural to me!

The plan on Wednesday was way out of scope for what I had time for, but I could definitely see myself coming back to the project after the jam to make it more of a full game. My only regret is that I didn’t set up gradle build tools earlier, so I ran out of time to ship a native Quest build even though I used the mobile rendering method.

my entry for the jam is just a template, no game, because my 4 month old baby decided there was no time for game design this week XD XD XD

anyway i wanted to share the structure i was preparing for a roomscale game. i hope it's useful for someone, and any testing is appreciated.

I have posted a full retrospective on Catzpah! Thanks everyone for playing the games, I can't wait for the next one of these! https://cabrown.itch.io/catzpah/devlog/769022/game-jam-retrospective