I've had a lot of fun over the past two weeks creating A Game of Jam and the engine behind it. Here are my thoughts on what went right, and what went wrong.

Why did I join this jam?

I wanted to push myself to create a complete game and game engine in less than two weeks.

What went right?

I managed to reach my goal. The whole process of making the game with such a time constraint was a great challenge, and helped me focus on creating a complete game without getting too stuck on details. I learned a lot and got a more holistic view of the creative process, and really feel like I want to continue making games (or game engines). Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you would like to collaborate on some project in the future!

What went wrong?

I’d say that everything that went wrong went right, since the whole purpose of this jam was to learn. So without further ado…

Here are the things I learned:

1. Draw a road map — knowing how to get to where you are heading is important. I started out ‘knowing’ what I wanted, but not how to get there. As time passed by, I realized that I had to set obtainable goals. I ended up having a set of goals for each day, and luckily I managed to complete them all on time!
2. Plan your code ahead / Structure your code — I guess this goes without saying, but it is so easy to end up with spaghetti code. I don’t know how many hours I spent on refactoring my code, just to refactor it again the following day (and the end result still looks pretty much like over-boiled spaghetti). My function calls look horrible, some of them have 6–7 variables passed to them! Sometimes it got so confusing that I didn’t even know what the variables were used for, and sometimes I passed the same variable twice! This was my greatest problem during this jam. Much of this stems from that I was making everything up as I was coding. If I would have spent some time on structuring the code better, and having planned more ahead, this could have been avoided to some extent.
3. Use variables from the start — I hard-coded a lot of values in the beginning, and changing those values to variables can be troublesome. You might miss one variable, which could make your whole game buggy. For instance, I hard-coded the tile size in the beginning, and missed to replace the values at some place, which lead to problems when resizing the screen, as well as problems with collision detection. So at the end of the day, not using variables from the beginning cost me extra time.
4. Get a team — Working completely solo is fun, but you don't get any feedback on what you are doing, and you have to spend time on things you might not want to do. If I would have worked with a pixel artist, I could have made my game isometric. The code is not that much different, but I would have had to make at least 8 different sprites for each monster (not including animations). Also, I didn't want to spend time finding the right music, and I spent approximately 5 minutes making the sound effects. With that being said, working solo has one great benefit. You get to experience every part of the development process. Which at times is overwhelming.

I hope you had as much fun as I did during these two weeks!

/ nilkun

Say hello to me on Discord: nilkun

or Twitter: @nilkun

Link to the game: https://itch.io/jam/my-first-game-jam-summer-2019/rate/446596