itch.io

I'm soo curious about your game, can't wait to try it out tonight, but now I've been writing feedbacks on itch since this morning, and I'm still getting paid by my company so I need to stop slacking off x) (gosh I love remote)

I'm happy that the game was fun to you, means a lot to me as I never really shared that much with the community for years of game dev. I'm actually starting this JAM to feel like being a community guy hahaha so you may see me around this week quite a lot !

Let's keep in touch :)

Edit: forgot to talk about scopes haha. It's obviously a challenging question to tackle, since to me it solely depends on your experience. At my beginnings making a JAM with two moving platforms and a player that can jump was almost everything I could handle in two days, but with time and experience you'll find better and better workflows. To this day the best thing I found for JAMs is to create content based games. It's tricky while programming, but that's what I like since I'm a software engineer. The essence of it is to find a system, for example a combat system, and making it as modulable as possible. This way no matter the time constraints you''l be able to create content quickly and even polish it. If I take my game a an example, I have all this that's modulable:

- Input system, it's decoupled so my players and AIs can all extend from it, this way coding new AIs is really quick as I don't care about handling their movement but just their "way of thinking"

- Upgrades, every entity have some kind of "Module pool" and each module is an actual self centered ability that can be attach to anything. So ofc the player get have dynamic modules at runtime, but I also give my enemies and allies modules in the same way so I don't have to handle any kind of specific attack system. Everything is based around the player.

When scoping my game, if I have entities other than the player, I like to make the player not standing out. Essentially in my game, the player has the exact same component as any other entities, the player has just the ability to gain more modules but that's it. And that's all, that's how you may obtain a rather polished game in 3 days like me. Creating a new module is a matter of 15min max if I have to extend my module, and an AI would maybe take 20min, all that's left is spending time balancing and polishing  the game, which in the end takes the most time.