So I've had a few days now since the end of the game jam to recieve some feedback on my game and just gather my thoughts in general.
I'd first like to say a big thank you to the jams organisers. I'd been wanting to test my skills and make something, but didn't know where to start, then I spotted this jam here on itch.io and thought "What do I have to lose by giving it a try."
I can say now that the experience was well worth it. I feel confident that I can make the game that I want to make, as long as I work on my weak areas of game development first.
Ok, on to the post mortem proper. Looking back to my project goals, I wanted to make a simple horror game in which a monster would chase you around a level. I also wanted it to take about 20 minutes to complete.
So one of those things wasn't as hard to implement as I thought, and the other was just a huge over estimation of what I could achieve given my skills and the time I had to work with. Spent about 60% of my dev time watching tutorials on how to do the thing I wanted to do. Tutorials on probuilder, how to use textures how to get certain parts of my code to work, making models in blender and how to import them without all the textures falling off (Yeah never really got that part to work). It meant I didn't get as much done as I wanted to, buuuuut, It also means that I'm coming out of this jam as a much better dev then when I started.
The games pretty short (about 4 to 6 minutes). If I could go back and do anything differrent it would be to try and do more with less. Make the game area smaller, but have the player spend more time in each area. Maybe by making the keys to the next area harder to find or having them solve a puzzle of some kind in order to progress. I feel using this method to legth my game would also have had the benefit of allowing me to build tension better as right now, the scares are presented without much build up.
My plan now is to spend the time in the build up to halloween working on the skills I found myself to be weak in (Namely 3d modeling, texture work and rigging), and try to build a demo version of a horror game I want to make. I'm going to try posting a devlog somewhere for that, as I found with this project that it helped keep me motivated.
Oh and if you haven't checked my game out yet you can find it here.
