POSTMORTEM
WOO wow it's so weird that it's already been a month. I literally just decided to do Devtober again this year on a whim with no idea of what type of game I wanted to make for the first several days, and I ended up with a pretty satisfying prototype. I think I'll just make a basic list of what went right / wrong / etc. like most other postmortems seem to be doing.
Good Stuff
- I took a good amount of time at the beginning of the jam to figure out what type of game I both wanted to make and thought I would be able to make without too much trouble. The intersection of these two things was very important imo.
- I managed to get the core mechanic (moving a kite around) feeling fun very early on; I'd call this a sort of snowball effect resulting from the good thing I mentioned above.
- Programming in general wasn't too complicated aside from the kite, which let me prototype and test different mechanics out pretty easily and quickly (again, snowball resulting from the "being able to make it without too much trouble" pre-planning)
- I like Kiteman he is a good character that I made
Not Good Stuff
Honestly there's not much I can think to write here. I wish I had more free time to work on this, I guess. Maybe I can think of a few more bullet points hmmmm.
- I expected to have a more complete game by the end of this. I'd attribute most of this to time constraints, though also there was a bit of frustration when it came to trying to conceive of and implement mechanics in the game that made it feel complete (I think a lot of this is because this is a pretty unique game that's hard to find references for); like right now, the Prototype is fairly basic, with just the regular kite movement + points that you can collect + projectiles to dodge. Granted, I think it's still pretty fun as it is, though I definitely think there could be more, somewhere somehow. However I did decide that just making some kind of finished thing and releasing it as a Prototype would be a good idea so I could get feedback, and so I could just use the Prototype as a base to build off of and hopefully make a full game out of it eventually.
Closing Thoughts and Things
This whole jam I've been thinking about how much better at game development I've gotten since last year. If you played my Devtober 2020 entry HOLLY, you'd know that it uhhh wasn't very good (I still think the dialogue is pretty good though). The whole past year I've worked on so many different projects and slowly improved in so many different game development related skills, and I think it shows pretty well in Action Kite, at least to some degree. This jam, I think, has reinforced for me the value of sticking with something you want to be good at and just not stopping (I mean though you should definitely take breaks know what I'm sayin haha heyyyyy); you'll almost certainly become objectively better at that thing over time if you just keep doing it. It's hard to gauge your progress sometimes, though every once in a while you do something you've done before, but you do it way better almost automatically and you gotta blink for a second and be like yo hol up I didn't realize I gained a SUPER power at some point dawg what in the blazing blue blazes, homie. So because of this I'm very glad I participated in Devtober this year. Also you can play Action Kite's prototype here wow! https://olivergallina.itch.io/action-kite-prototype