Spent a day reflecting on the project and here are a collection of my thoughts. to an extent I am quite proud that el fideo rubio and I managed to more or less get a working game completed, but at the same time it is nowhere near the level of completed that I had originally planned on. When we started making the project, I ended up planning out virtually all the features, and gave them rough time frames usually taking about a day, or maybe a few small ones that consumed a day. For the most part, even when I had errors and mistakes that I had to correct, I was able to stay on schedule. That being said, a 90s text adventure with a 3d environment is not what I had planned for. i had stuck to my schedule, and planned things accordingly, so where did I go wrong? While I gave myself well enough time to complete each individual goal, as well as enough time to complete the project, I was forced to take several days off for my family. As it turns out, I forgot to take that into consideration so as the final days approached my plan was looking good until it was the last day and I had about 2 days left of stuff planned out. Oops.
That being said, I though about and reflected upon mostly this issue, and came to the conclusion that at the end of everyday I need to spent a few minutes reevaluating my plans. It'll be super simple as in most cases I'll scim over my notes and go yup, everything still fits within the allotted time. But if I ever run into a deadline issue similar to this one, then I'll know when to start cutting things out. For example, I would have cut out the waiter dialogue and replaced it with in game kill animations like we had originally wanted.
All in all, I would say as far as learning goes, this game jam further reinforced the skills that I knew I had. I was constantly struggling with this and that going along, but given a bit of time I fixed the issue and did so within my original time constraints. That being said, my biggest issue is not planning enough. I could have cut a lot of time out if i had just planned a little bit more in the beginning. As I made blueprints for the actors and UMG, I realized I had a lot of stuff that could be reused here, and slightly tweaked here, resulting in me remaking parent classes and ultimately wasting time for something I should have done in the beginning.
At the end of the day I had fun making this game, and realized that my flaws are ever present, and I need to continue moving forward sharpening my skills and finding clever ways to minimize my flaws. but that's enough rambling for now, see y'all when I release my next project, which will hopefully be complete, lol.
until next time,
SprattStud ^~^