You flatter too much! I probably shouldn't say so, but I really missed having a complete game from you this jam, though I am glad for the effort presented. I hope for and look forward to next year to see more of your talent. :>
p.s., hope you saw the moof -- it was mostly because of reading up on Susan Kare, but that was ultimately due to seeing a certain icon in Discord.
Actually, I missed moof! Thanks for pointing it out, nice detail, haha.
One of the things I like most from this being a relatively small community is that we get to see something beyond other people's games; we get to learn about their identity when it comes to game design, their subjective preferences, the ideas that they gravitate around and get them excited and drive them to create. You can expect heartfelt fables from Daigo, otherworldly spaces and mind-bending experiences from Zyko, equation-solving-like challenges from Quasylite, resource management and upgrade focused games from Elamre, Loïg's minimalism and his gift to create deep puzzle-like mechanics from small and elegant rulesets.
And I say all this for two reasons: first, highlight the beauty of it; second, to bring the point home that expecting complete games from me on a game jam is... misguided? I like creating worlds. Typically moody, somewhat ethereal worlds, something that will capture my own imagination. Worlds that make you ask yourself what's beyond what's presented in the game, where the game story is only a small series of events within a broader universe. In Retromancer, for example, you also managed to create a small, cohesive and unique world, but gameplay and content are always at the center, with other parts acting as a supporting elements. You make a world to add color to the game and anchor it to a theme. Being very ambitious and never neglecting any of those elements that can help make a game more colorful or fun may be an important part of your identity as game designers, but you always keep gameplay and content that you can interact with at the center, as the first focus, trying to create a complete experience around it. And it totally works.
All these styles are absolutely fine, and it's great that we all do different things, but I feel like my approach is among the most incompatible with game jams, and creating a complete experience will almost never be my main goal. At the same time, when compared to most other jam participants, all this might make me more prone to keep working on a project even after the jam ends. I've worked on ideas and content for 10 miles of the project, even if I only ended up showing 1, because creating foundations that I'm pleased about takes a disproportionate amount of time for my style. And that's why I'm great at text walls and tutorials, because I always go much further than what may be considered healthy in terms of pondering, trying to examine things from multiple perspectives, being impractically contemplative. But that's my way of doing things.
(That was a very long way to tell you to adjust your expectations, hahaha.)
