Hey,

Me and my mate Unrealvision thought it would be cool to do a retrospective about the jam.
It is a great way to list the things that we did great and the things we did wrong in order to improve for the next jam.
This is something we do at work (i'm a software engineer and he is a ui designer) and we encourage everyone to do the same (in this thread if you want).

Our game is SuperSugarSailor https://itch.io/jam/kenney-jam-2023/rate/2184272
It's about finding candies and the sacred sugar cane in the sweet sea.
Engine : Godot

This is our first game jam !

We did not "ultra try hard" the jam and slept and eat at our regular hours. Note that for our first game jam we did it in person and not remotely.

We worked approximately 19h. We started 3 hours late the jam and as I said we took time to eat and sleep at least 8h / day.
We were two so we had 38 man hour

Here is the time we spent (approximately) :

• Pure GameDev : 20h
• Being Stuck : 10h total
  
  • Shaders/Particules : 2h (we gave up)
  • Auto tiling / Tilemap (we partially gave up) : 2h
  • Git / Export : 6h (yeah... we should have read the godot gitignore recommendation before trying to merge our branches... + merge error)
• Musics making and searching for sea sounds : 3h
• Game export and testing (making sure that there was no obvious bugs and that the game worked on itchio) : 2h30
• Visuals / Itchio page :  1h30
• Game Design : 1h (hard to tell because it was often at the same time as the gamedev)

What we did wrong : No clear map / arrow or indication to known where the player is, Bad tutorial, We tried to do shaders without knowing anything about it

What we did well : We were not too stubborn and gave up on the things that were not that important as a whole (80/20 rule I think?). We managed time well and concentrated on the essential things with an initial to do list. We also knew we coulnd't do everything at the same time so we created some other tasks to do in // (music, visuals, UI etc)

We will try to do better next time :D

Now its your turn ( if you want ! ofc)

EDIT After the jam :
We are really happy with the results -> 68 overall, 22 theme, 100 gameplay, 143 visuals !
We clearly need to improve the visual aspect and global feel of the game, also the tutorial was causing problems and people where geeting lost.
Based on the feedbacks we got from you all, we created a list of the things that we plan to add to the game in order to challenge ourselves and improve ! Those in bold are more likely to be added as they seemed more "critical" based on your feedbacks and what we planned to do during the jam anyway.

Gameplay :

• Arrow indicating the spawn
• Ship rotation to be more fluid
• Ajout d'obstacles / mobs

• Better tutorial + needs to disapear after x seconds or after quitting the spawn
 

Améliorations graphiques/sons :

• Collision hit sound + small animation
• Moving sea
  
• Water trail 
• Some seagull
• Wind sound at max speed
• Some more island decoration
• Shadow for the ship and island
• Idle and moving animation for the ship 
• Volume slider

Great retrospect!!

This is my first game jam too so I would like to share my story as well. 

Just like you I went into the jam maintaining a decent enough sleeping and eating schedule(Roughly 6hrs sleep and 2hrs breaks). I solo developed my game using unreal engine from scratch which I think was a big mistake. I was completely off the mark as to how long it takes just to implement the basic structure of the game (like character movement and such). Just this much too almost the entirety of the first day. Now knowing fully well, my lack of knowledge in texture and asset importing and the general random unreal engine behavior I was determined to import and check out all the assets b4 I go to sleep. Now is when I realized that I should have given more time for this task as all the assets either were discoloured (for some reason the hue was totally off) which I had to fix manually one by one and all the assets were way too freaking small compared to my environment.

Day 2 was a hell scape. Assets were showing random visual anomalies (which had to do something with me placing them real close or something :D). I still hadn't implement any of the levels, hadn't implemented any of the gameplay mechanics and didn't have the time to implement a main menu screen. So I did what i do best and yolod it. Made a level named main menu with instruction spread throughout as floating texts. Made 3 levels and duplicated them so that I can make a one way flow instead of having to do a complex loop. Copy pasted some blueprint logic I knew I couldn't conjure up in time and then went on to build the project. The final result is playable enough I guess but I missed a lot of obscure places where I should have had instructions for. But hey they game atleast looks hella impressive for something I did in 2days!(Proud of myself)

Overall should have not implement everything from scratch. 5/10 failure rate, could have been worse!

You can check out my game for yourself here!: https://itch.io/jam/kenney-jam-2023/rate/2184146 
:D

Great idea for a thread and thanks for sharing your insights.

I'm the programmer from Marco Yolo which you can find here if you are interested: https://itch.io/jam/kenney-jam-2023/rate/2179052

We had spent some time familiarising ourselves with the asset packs before we got started so that we could quickly imagine what to make once the theme was announced. We really loved the tiny dungeon and roguelike character packs and were quite eager to use those if we could. We had already dreamed of making a weapon / armour system with the roguleike character pack. Needless to say we were not disappointed when the theme was announced!

We didn't plan to spend inhumane hours working so we did have sleep and screen breaks, though probably not enough! Being up against the clock was really motivating and we ended up quite addicted to our concept once we got some good progress on it.

It was really satisfying to be able to prototype mechanics in such  a short time - we managed to include procedurally generated worlds, varied encounters, different enemies and armour as well as some (hopefully) funny dialogue. Code quality definitely suffered as a result of the rush though. Our artist loved working with the Kenney packs - hopefully you'll agree he made some really awesome encounter backgrounds with them.

We also lost some time to source control funny stuff but I think that's just the price of doing business! We were trying to be quite conservative with our ambitions on the project and so we discarded a lot of ideas that would have really fit but I think that was necessary to finish in the time with something we were happy with.  We had a playable build earlyish on Saturday afternoon which gave us plenty of time for testing.

Overall we managed to make a pretty entertaining, pretty playable rogulike in 48 hours - not bad for our first game jam! We'll be back next year!

Amazing retrospectives! I also have lots to share.

Im the developer of my game TownsFolk, which can be found here:

Rate TownsFolk by PikaStars for Kenney Jam 2023 - itch.io

Before the jam began, I was planning on making an endless runner. That was the plan until I saw the theme, which I just could not incorporate into the game, so I had to think of something new. 

I remembered a game I played one or two years ago, which was about the player completing tasks for people in a village until it's revealed that those tasks were actually used to do some pretty disturbing things. I thought of making a horror game like that, but I just didn't know if I had enough time. But, being the only idea I had, I settled on it.

I worked about four to six hours on the first day, mostly making the map layout and making the textbox system. Not much to say about it, but I needed to go somewhere for about five hours, so I didn't have the whole day to work on it. I was pretty proud of the progress I made, though.

The next day, I decided to take lots and lots of breaks. I finished the map, made all the npcs, tested for bugs, and added audio. This all took the whole entire day. Then, I spent an hour getting stuck on a problem with the text system, which I eventually solved. After that, I was finished with the game, and submitted it to the jam.

In conclusion, this jam was a blast and taught me so much- not just coding, also time management skills. I hope to participate in the next Kenney Jam. See you then!

Hey ! Thanks for your insights all ! It was very interesting. I edited my post to reflect the result and to synthesize most of the feedbacks we got. Was a great jam ! See you next time !