The Hypnotist and the Diamond Rose | 30/5/2020
This is the first game I submitted to a game jam! Specifically, it was for Mini Jam 55: Stealth (a short weekend jam). If you want, you can go and play it here!
Overall the game ranked 24th out of 79 entries (ranking 9th in use of the theme!). I'm happy with this result and it was awesome to get such great feedback from those who played my game.
I want to say straight up that I don't think this is a good game. While it has no game breaking bugs, there are a few issues and I think that the world can feel quite empty and boring. Furthermore the code is not great to say the least. I think these problems mainly stem from a lack of planning and experience. Firstly, planning. While I did spend some time thinking about how I wanted the game to play and look like, I didn't spare even a minute to think about how I was going to create the features I wanted - I just made it up as I went along. I think the best example of this is my NPCS. There are three NPCs in the game: The pedestrians, the guard and the curator. While coding their behaviours I ended up repeating a lot of code, and thinking back an inheritance approach with a base NPC class would have been a lot better. Secondly, experience. I think the main thing I learned from this jam is that my approach was wrong. Instead of having a big idea and working up to it, I think a better approach would be to have a small idea and build on it. This way you have something playable all the way and don't have to get bogged down with no end in sight. If I had to make this game again, I would spend more time on the core mechanics (making them as best as they could be and ironing out any small bugs) and instead of having one big level I would create multiple smaller ones. This way I would have something playable that I could submit much sooner and then use any extra time I had left adding more levels. Another advantage with this approach is that as each level would be physically smaller I could decorate each one more to make it look better and less boring.
Anyway, with that all being said, I still am happy with my decision to enter the game jam. If not for the final result, for the lessons I learned along the way. I'm excited to enter more jams in the future and improve my skills.