Jam Submission Post-Mortem

Greetings!

"Primal Might" is my first solo jam submission (its my second jam). The game is worth about 45 hours of development work. I started the design mid-morning Friday, and I submitted the game just minutes under the deadline. 

Intensions.

I wanted to see what I was made of for this jam. I had not made a game in this short amount of time before. I've been focusing on art and audio lately, and I was excited to jump back into code, and to flex my design skills -- it's always a fun challenge to design a cohesive microcosm and who doesn’t love a timed creative prompt?

Theme.

Given the theme, “Failure is Progress,” I wanted the player to die for a good reason, perhaps to ensure the survival of their species, the ultimate (inevitable) form of survival! For a secondary theme, I went with population dynamics/survival of the fittest, with a sprinkling of utilitarianism.

There are several core concepts that I decided on to drive the themes.

“Failure is Progress”:

• A unit’s corpse will provide gameplay elements: food, a weapon, or a platform to stand on.

“Playing with Win/Lose Conditions”:

• Individual death does not end the playthrough. The player's control spans over a species’ lifetime, not an individual’s lifetime.
• Victory is not the end. Little victories can contribute to a greater victory, and “winning” isn’t necessarily the end of the game.
• Multiple victory conditions:
  • Finding the Everlasting Meat Tree. This is both a scripted victory, and a practical victory as it gives out (cooked) food endlessly.
  • Species Dies Out. Whether it’s the player’s starting species or the other, ultimately, it’s a victory for one species.
  • All units have died out. This is the true conclusion of the game loop. Even this is a victory, (for someone like a plant god)!

Lessons.

I could have managed my time better to end up with a more complete game and a higher potential for WOWIE! I spent too much time on art, and nearly not enough time on audio and UI/Tutorials.

My design could have been more concise. I was keeping too many concepts alive that were not the meat and bones of gameplay – concepts that received development time and were ultimately cut. Being more concise and pointed in my design would have mitigated the engorging time requirements for the engine that ultimately sucked development time away from other areas.

I spent too long re-creating code files that already existed on my machine.  I’m still figuring out the ethics of reusing my own code. Bringing in old files feels like cheating, and it changes the Created by date of the project, which is a huge pet peeve for me, especially for a jam. The cost of this is me spending hours re-creating code files that essentially use the same methodologies. We are our own worst enemies, sometimes, right?

I know the next time I endeavor, as I have for this project, I will do even better!

Thanks for listening & Have a nice day!

Carly