It has been 2 weeks since the end of the 3rd Scratch Game Jam, and i thought i would write an in-depth post-mortem about what i did, what went wrong an other things.
What did i do?
I made 2 games, one being a rhythm game about hitting blocks like Beat Saber, and one being an endless platformer, with you controlling a baseball. Both of these show themes of survival, Paper Saber having the healthbar mechanic, and Balls. having the endless survival pressure. What i found interesting was how these systems came about. It took 3 full days to create a mostly-functional editor for Paper-Saber, one which you have to manually offset after using the editor.
With Balls. it was hard to find the proper balance for how many objects to instantiate with the difficulty curve i introduced. This was because of how much testing it took to properly allow enough player flexibility throughout, while still allowing that quite gradual difficulty curve. These systems turned out quite compact and solid, just half baked on the inside, like a cookie, so it took time to get the inside of the cookie to harden eough to be soft and decedant and deliciously gooey (wait, are we still talking about cookies?)
What went wrong?
Everything! Making two games in 5 is absolutely NEVER a good idea unless you have solid ideas for them both - even then it can be hard to build them all up from the point you brainstormed them. With Paper-Saber, i found that instantiation delays were quite an issue because of the way the editor works, procedurally bringing these objects in and not counting the time for them to actually GET to the player. This resulted in me having to hardcode an 18 vibrasecond (the time the game runs in) offset on all notes. This was okay, but definetly could be improved.
With Balls., as i said before, having the correct difficulty curve between the levels were extremely difficult to develop correctly.
What would i do better?
Definetly take time and feasibility into consideration. I was very lucky to be able to have such a high ranking in 2 categories for Paper-Saber and a few minimal ones for Balls., as my games were developed in a way that allowed the full experience but minimal infrastructure inside of the actual code. Feasibility would be a key factor to have, as you NEED to finish the game, and making a full RPG with 15 minutes worth of cutscenes and over 20 characters, understandably, would take a long time. I mean - look at Elden Ring, it took 25 years to get to the state it's currently in.
Would i do this again?
That's the big question, and i definetly would. The pressure and adrenaline making a game was very exciting and although there was a lot of stress making these two games, i definetly had a lot of fun making them, and would do this all again if i could! (Except get more views on YouTube by making the video better). But yeah.
Thank you for reading this Post-Mortem. Ask any questions you have below, and i will do my best to answer them.