Post Game Jam Retrospetive

My first ever game jam as a solo dev. Thank you all for playing my game and giving me feedback. I have learned a lot from my game jam and I wanted to reflect on a few aspects of making this game.

How did I build it?

The game was always going to be built in Godot. I wanted to built a game which was:

• Easy to write
• Single Mechanic (if any)
• Less than five minutes long.

This way, I am not stressed to complete the game and I can produce something which I personally like. 

I took inspiration from The Chef’s Shift, which is a typing game that I played a while ago and, decided to build something similar. Once the theme was revealed, it became relatively easy to figure out the gameplay loop and what features I wanted.

The game was supposed to have the following components:

• A Key press handler
• A way to keep track of all of the type-able words on the screen
• A score keeper
• A character component which would fly across from one word to another

It was during the jam, someone on discord pointed me towards SilentWolf which is a leaderboard plugin on Godot and I knew I wanted to incorporate that with the game.

The game progressed nicely but I could only spend two hours or so on the game everyday during the week so the bulk of the work had to be done during the submission weekend. During the weekend, I realised I had made a mistake.

My keypress handler and words manager was tied in together with the level i.e. when the words are fully typed the word would disappear. Unfortunately, I needed the first two components to be agnostic to what happens to the word so I can use it for the menu etc.

So I spent half of Saturday on decoupling the logic. This was my first mistake: always make sure components are de-coupled.

Next problem came with the game art. I don't know enough about the art. I was stupidly was trying to scale assets in Paint instead of working with viewports on Godot. I wasted a lot of time on this too before I found the perfect assets. So I know now, always find the assets as early as possible.

Because of these two, I added the leaderboard plugin on Sunday afternoon. I could only test to see if it works but I couldn't do an more testing. So my third mistake: no new features on the last day of the jam.

My last mistake was on after the submissions. I needed to market and make friends for the game jam. 

See the jam results were purely ratings based, so I needed at least 20 ratings to qualify. But for the first week I was so tired that I did nothing: I didn't rate other games and thus didn't get any feedback or ratings. So now I know: a game jam extends from first date to the end of voting period.

What’s next?

I have a couple of bugs I want to fix. 

Leaderboards need to be sorted correctly.

Currently, the game sorts the leaderboard by the highest value first. I want the lowest time first.  I am not 100% sure how to do it yet with the plugin, but I might have to migrate the data from one version to another.

Adaptive Screen resolution

I would like the game to be smart enough to fit any resolution the user selects. So if the game isn’t full screen, it should still work.

Main Menu case sensitivity

One mistake I made with the game was that the main menu was case sensitive. I tried to put in an instruction page but it wasn’t clear enough and a lot of people said they had trouble starting the game. So I want to make it simple.

Less words

The game was tough for a lot of people. So I would like to decrease the base difficulty by reducing the number of words from 30 down to maybe 20?

Game Music

 The game music doesn't loop. Additionally, the keypress sounds are not always aligned.

I plan to take it easy and get the new build available by the end of the month. But no guarantees as I am also working on other projects so this will not be the highest priority.