MFGJ Postmortem

This game is unfinished, we ran into bugs during development. The scope of the project was too big for us to finish during the game jam window. I (Pingu_Pox) take responsibility for this as I participated in my first game jam (GMTK) during the first 2 days of this jam, which left me exhausted and costed us almost 25% of the development time.

I asked my team how they felt about development, and we have some takeaways that I would like to discuss.

1. Know your scope - We wanted this game to be deep and introspective, as well as relaxing and engaging. As development started on the 4th day of the game jam, we had a goal in mind: "Make the starting area and the ending area, then we'll fill in the rest." That sounded good in theory, but it prevented us from actually seeing what would fill the gap. As we got to work on the platform, and our protagonist, we ran into some technical issues we had to get together and work through with the art production. This was expected as it was the first time we were adding our own custom art into the engine, we were pretty green in this aspect. After working through that, I tried to get animations to work properly, and this is where I spent way too much time. We should have skipped the animations and saved them for later, as we were 50% of the way through the jam, and I still had no actual gameplay made yet, just the start zone and an idea of what the end zone would look like. This ended up getting away from us, we ran out of time, but we still love the project and want to see it to completion at a later date. We ultimate want to make a game that we would like to play.

2. Respect personal limitations - We're in the middle of a pandemic, money is tight, so we're putting in hours at full-time jobs daily. This combined with differing time-zones really made it hard to get together and work, even if we made ourselves reachable on Discord at all times. We weren't about to keep ourselves up past a decent bedtime and jeopardize our day jobs, or our health (we have kids and spouses we have responsibilities for).

3. Broad picture, narrow picture - This kinda falls under "Know your scope", but I felt it could stand on it's own. We should have had the entire gameplay structure understood before we started development, then after that was fleshed out, added more detail and flavor. We wasted a lot of time playing with features after implementing them just to delete them and start over. This could have been avoided if we put more time into the conceptualization phase. We should have started with a simple mission statement (You play an otter in a sunken apocalypse, and must use your fishing rod and mallet to survive and find life) and designed around that. We instead started with an Otter and fishing rod and wanted to make a fishing game, which was very broad. If we had thought about this more before putting work into the game, we may have been able to implement the theme "Change" more faithfully instead of just representing how the world "changed" in the plot, and how the wind "changes" to bring forth new structures (optionally navigable with a sail and mast).

With that said, please enjoy this "exploratory" demo of our game, which honestly is just a prototype featuring the control scheme and some features that were partially implemented, but ultimately were not completed in time. If and when we pick this game back up (whether just me, or with a team), it makes sense to start over and consider the choices we made before moving onto what we originally planned. After all, if you love an idea, don't let it die.

Thanks for reading, please take care of yourselves during these trying times.
-Pingu_Pox