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A jam submission

Work ShenanigansView game page

Submitted by Razer1999, simonbaumy — 11 minutes, 37 seconds before the deadline
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Work Shenanigans's itch.io page

Names and Email Addresses of Team Members
7 November 2022, 20:00 SAST for 72 hour entries.
Michael S. Engelbrecht - michaelsengelbrecht@gmail.com
Simon Pascal Bayman - simonbaumy@gmai.com

Categories Your Team is Eligible For
Overall, Student, Technical Excellence, Best Audio, Best Physics

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Comments

(+1)

This is really impressive technically. And I can see the shape of the puzzle, though I gave up at the yellow truck.

If I can be honest, I feel like this is a pattern with Twin Hydra game jam games. Twin Hydra games have a lot of content in them, but the content is frustrating to wade through.

I'd love to see Twin Hydra do a small game well instead of a big game badly. My concern is that the skills needed to make an experience enjoyable aren't been practiced in these games... each game has a different janky movement scheme... lots of unique but once off simple puzzles that players briefly encounter with no room for mastering. In layman's terms: "This isn't fun."

I applaud the innovation and the creativity and the technical competence... but I worry about this pattern I'm seeing. I only worry about it because it seems to me Twin Hydra are incredibly talented, but are going about development ass-backwards. Nothing feels iterated or playtested, it all just feels ticked-off.

I'd be happy to explain further. I'm not sure if I'm being clear here. My critique isn't aimed at the game itself, but rather what I perceive/expect to be the process behind the game, and other recent Twin Hydra games.

Developer

Hey Evan thanks for the feedback!

We tried making a kind dystopian corpo environment(twitter¿) where you used your free-time in-between work quotas to setup a power ranger-megazord  fusion by combining robots together after unlocking all of them - but instead of happy ending, you setup a doomsday Skynet scenario. 

Instead we a made meh framework with no juice or paid any attention to the player experience. 

What we have in our heads is never close to what we submit, and I'll be honest I get so disappointed It takes me a few days to get back to looking at the submission page or project.  We overestimate how much progress we will make towards the game and take long breaks and sleep-in and when the final days comes it just ends up as a submission rather than a game since all we do is get some basic sounds, remove some bugs and make the game possible to complete, which people won't because it isn't engaging, and submit a few minutes before the deadline without playtesting feedback.

We don't approach game jams with a jam mentality, and everything falls flat since the time that should put into making it fun keeps getting pushed back to later when "everything else" is in - which ends up not happening.  We know this isn't new feedback for us, and we were even like "hey lets keep it to one room this time" and it just ended up expanding again. 

Going forward we will probably experiment with maybe adding a third person or doing individual submissions to get a better bearing of each other.

Even though the game did not meet our expectations, we still thoroughly enjoyed the game jam and are looking forward to future ones! We appreciate the SA GAME JAM and Free Lives for hosting it!

(+1)

Super glad that you're not demoralized. Your game is still technically very impressive, and maybe could have been great if you had had three weeks on it, but it's clear (like you say) that you didn't get time to do anything else other than "get everything in".

I don't think adding a third person to the team will help.

Expanding the team means more communication, more time spent getting everyone onto the same page and excited. The team will grow by 50% but the work you'll be able to do might increase by 25%... and you'll probably try be even more ambitious now that you have a third teammate (assuming nothing else changes).

I feel pretty confident it will play out that way, that you'll just be more ambitious with three people, because Twin Hydra seem to have a little bit of time blindness, and a lot of enthusiasm for new features.

I too have a lot of enthusiasm for adding more things into a game. At Free Lives I'm probably the person who is most inclined to over scope and just keep adding more. I don't think it's a harmful impulse when harnessed for good, but it can lead to disappointment and sorrow when used for evil (in my experience).

Maybe if you split up, each working on their own game, you'd find you are both less ambitious and so work more within your means, and maybe you'll have better outcomes...

But that seems sort of sad. And honestly I think you're just going to run into this problem at a later stage anyway.

Here's my advice... get your salt pinching fingers ready... I do a couple things these days that help me avoid overscoping:

A) I attach times to tasks. If the task says "implement a new major mechanic", for example movement, it's a day of work in a jam. This includes testing and iteration of course. If the thing needs to interact and actually feel good - it takes a day, if it can be janky then if can be a bit quicker.

Critically: the time a task takes isn't the raw implementation time, the time a single task takes includes all the iterations and time spent talking about how to fix it or improve it. Don't even try predict it, just mark it down as a day.

This means I can do two or maybe three mechanics in a jam, and I have to make the game enjoyable with just those. And I'm pretty damn fast at jamming.

For instance the robot movement is a day, the camera system is a day, puzzles in the robot space is a day, the moving from in world to computer screen is maybe half a day, the Clippy system is half a day, the carrying around a robot in FPS view is a day. The megazord fusion is a day. Some sort of doomsday ending is a day. 

i.e. I know before I've started that I couldn't have made the game you were trying to make in a jam. So, hopefully, I wouldn't have tried.

B) I don't move on from a task until it is tested and it is good (and it is tested again).

If moving a robot around is bad or untested, I won't start with movement/camera puzzles, if the puzzles at the robot level are bad or untested, I won't build the FPS part where you drop the robot in the hole, if the FPS part is bad or untested I won't build the fake Windows interface... and so on.

Generally in a jam I'm then designing games that have multiple exit points. Like if I'm running out of time it will still be good if it is just X, but if things go well we can do X and Y. 

i.e. My plan is always start small and expand in layers like an onion.

This obviously has some drawbacks... mostly that it makes it hard to write a narrative, literally not knowing what the game will do at the end of the jam, so I will start off with a vague idea of stories the game could tell are, and only fill in those details when the game has the elements to tell those stories. It's a compromise of course, but I think it's generally better than trying to tell the whole story despite the game not supporting that story.

Beyond narrative difficulties, in general this iterative approach means you cannot plan the entire game at the start. At best you can have a theory of what the game could be, but there will be a ton of "if this is fun" or "if we implement this really well". I'll have a plan B in case the ambitious elements need to be cut, and most often I am forced to fall back to a plan B, or plan C or D... but that's generally because plan A couldn't have been implemented well in the time.

The HUGE upside about working iteratively instead of sticking to a plan is that making games just isn't predictable. Sometimes one seemingly small feature turns out to be a massive challenge requiring a lot of iteration, sometimes the feature turns out to straight-up suck, and then the shape of the whole game needs to change because you actually only have half the time you'd expected to do the rest. Since this ALWAYS happens, in my mind it's better not to plan in detail in the first place because it makes it emotionally more challenging to pivot later.

Those are my thoughts.

A) Allocate realistic time for tasks when you are planning.

B) Don't plan, work incrementally and iteratively.

Developer(+1)

Your insight will help a lot with untangling our poor approaches to jamming and game dev in general.  Following your advice, we will be sticking as a two-man team for the next jam as well ( + our name kinda loses its meaning if we change the number of devs or temporarily split lol).

We'll also be diving into the next jam following along with your advice and practices,  while also creating a time slot for to playtest games during jams.  Since the game wasn't done - the feedback won't be that useful and a time sink since they are missing the "bigger picture" - was a kind of dumb generalised mentality we had during jams (especially since it never got to the bigger picture) and won't be the case anymore since we will using the iterative approach you recommended.  These changes will hopefully drop the flop factors by giga amounts so that we can actually put something out that we can feel overall good about. 

Since we will be (attempting) to make a fun and exciting mechanic driven game first and building around it and instead of the reverse, we'll hopefully be making a bit more of a splash next time around!

Again, thank you for the time you put into helping us!

Submitted(+1)

A very interesting concept. Great atmosphere! I can see a lot of work went into this. Love it!

Submitted(+1)

Extremely impressive technicality wise! Really liked the intro and the atmosphere. Awesome game.

Submitted(+1)

Great colors and art.

I somehow managed to break it so that the blue robot didn't spawn once I dropped it down the tube. After that I had to look at your vid, and following your exact steps it was then ok.

Probably making less systems and fine tuning the remaining ones so they're tighter would have been better, but a great jam overall.

I can only give it a Transformer/Robot score for following the theme.

Submitted(+1)

Clearly a lot of work went into this, well done - awesome concept!

Developer

Thank you so much! :D

Developer

For anyone who's unable to experience the game on a computer, we've compiled a walkthrough of our game from start to finish. for your convenience. Enjoy! 

Before you watch this video, I highly recommend playing the game first, see if you're able to complete it before watching this gameplay walkthrough video as this video will spoil the entire experience in terms of gameplay patterns, puzzle solving, etc

Submitted(+2)

I loved this. Well done.  Well done all involved, really something to be proud of. 


Feedback: I didn't know really what to do after all the tasks were done. Do you wait for the timer to finish? Maybe the taskdone function didn't work in the build. 

Developer (1 edit) (+1)

Thank you for the splendid feedback. The game is finishable so everything does work as attended. If you haven't finished the game yet, and you've tried everything, I suggest watching the walkthrough that I'll be releasing in the comments soon, which is mainly meant for those with no access to pcs or a gaming computer but would like to watch the gameplay of the game. 

Thanks again!