School is Canceled - post mortem

My game ‘School is Canceled’ recently passed the 20 rating milestone! I figured I’d write up a quick celebratory post mortem for myself and anyone who cares to read it. Huge thanks to everyone who gave feedback and critiques! It helps immensely to make me a better developer.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/school-is-canceled

I almost always approach jams as an opportunity to get out of my comfort zone and learn / improve on a new skill or system. This time around, I had one goal in mind: polish polish polish. Instead of my usual programmer art, I handed some markers to my mom and sister, and dedicated about a third of my time to animations alone. I also made sure to layer in as many details as I could think of, including particle systems, intro and credits sequences, sound effects, and more. All in all, I’m pretty happy with how the polishing turned out.

Unfortunately, my focus on polishing the game’s environment left the mechanics a bit underdeveloped. I decided early on that I wouldn’t do any combat mechanics to save some time (a unique challenge given the theme) but even just platforming alone proved to be a bit too much. The platforming didn’t turn out terrible by any means, but there’s a lot of room for improvement. A lot of the feedback I got was regarding the game being too difficult as a result of the tough controls and unpolished physics.

Had I realized this soon enough, I could have either fixed the mechanics up a little more, or designed the levels to be easier and offset the problem. During development, however, I was actually worried about the exact opposite: that the game was too easy. I had spent so much time testing the game that I became a master of my flawed mechanics and didn’t consider that the player wouldn’t have the same time to practice as I did.

The lesson: just because you’re good at your mechanics, doesn’t mean your mechanics are good. Get your game into the hands of play testers ASAP and get the outsider’s perspective.

All in all, I had a blast making School is Canceled and I’m really proud of the result. Can’t wait for October!

You can play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/school-is-canceled