Game Jam Postmortem

Forgot to make a postmortem for this game, but I shouldn't since these devlogs help me collect my thoughts and serve as a good self-reflection.

From my last 2 complete jam games, in terms of enjoyment, this was in between. To start with, I was frustrated and demotivated at the start. This was mainly due to the theme, which in my opinion, I'm still not a big fan of. But I would say I was, in a lack of better words, annoyingly bitchy about it. It wasn't that bad, and I should've sucked it up and went to developing. I think my attitude was because in the past I had been able to easily come up with ideas for themes or I had ideas coming into the jam that I could change up a bit to fit the theme. In this jam, none of my pre-jam ideas could be changed to fit, and the initial ideas I had weren't something I was happy with.

And honestly, this game could've turned out one of my best if I didn't spend 2 days straight whining and being reluctant. Although I thought the game has good polish, I've received a lot of comments on the overall game feel being a bit off. If I had my head in the game at the start, not only would've reached my initial game scope but also polished the game more. That being said, I'm still proud of this game, simply because I didn't give up and kept going.

So onto discussion of the game and process. I spent a lot of time for some reason the main sprite (who knew a 16x16 axolotl is hard to make, and now try to make it swim and hold a speargun!) This was also the first jam in which I really focused on good code, so using composition and actual design patterns. Because of this, I didn't have time to make a tileset and make a more expansive level. Initially I wanted a day by day fishing simulator with a larger map and rotating fish spawns, but even with my head in a good place I'm not sure if I could've done that in time. Regardless, it's nice to have a game that isn't all spaghetti code.

Lastly, this was the first game I made that had an actual done for it. Not saying my pixel art isn't art, but being to complete a higher res sprites is very satisfying.