Post-Jam: Post-Mortem

HOW’D THE JAM GO?

good, i had fun with the whole process; lost a bit of time to some other obligations and events that were going on during that period, but those were good buffer-zones to take a break.

HOW ARE YOU NOW?

fucking TIRED, my body is self-correcting my sleep schedule by forcing me to knock out early – which isn’t due to lack of sleep, i made sure to only have a typical working day of time allocated for working on this.

at least until the last couple days where I nearly started pulling crunchy hours.

WHAT WENT RIGHT?

surprisingly, quote a lot. i’ve had some practice trying to budget for time and manage scope which lead to getting a lot laid out ahead of time; all in service of knocking things out without having to switch gears too much.

WHAT WENT WRONG?

i gotta close the gameloop earlier, it’s a bad idea to keep it on hold until the last third of a jam. there were so many numbers i wanted to throw at this and ended up weirdly balancing the wheel stats. it doesn’t help that my time budget went roughly as follows:

level and ui Layout: 2 day ui skinning and tuning wheel: 4 days gameloop: 1 day (somebody help me budget my game is dying)

i think there was a bit too much focus on doing visual design too early for anything outside of the wheel-house.

WHAT WAS PLANNED?

i had something in mind a bit more chaotic and dynamic, with more wheels popping up over time, often falling into the play space. the ultimate goal was to create stress through overwhelming the player by having them not only deal with the wheels but trying to do very simple non-wheel minigames.

additionally, throwing breaks into the game loop where the player would have minigames like dealing with surprise calls, instant messages, and having to actually respond to some emails.

WHAT WE ENDED UP WITH

wheel management with emails popping up at you that you can’t respond to, which has still accomplished the original goal of building stress for players. on playing it back afterwards, i do see how i can re-balance the wheels (and make much of the math simpler).

it ends up as a metaphor for spinning your wheels on a task.

WHAT NEXT

i might come back to this and finish out a few of the remaining scoped items, i just have a few other outside tasks to tend to.

FINISHING THOUGHTS

hey you, the one still reading this: hydrate and don’t forget to rest.