PolyFury - A PostMortem

First things first - congratulations to everyone that finished! Making and releasing a game over a weekend is an awesome accomplishment and you should all be proud of yourselves 😁

About the game

So, another jam finished. Feedback is coming in, and I have to say everyone has been incredibly kind! If you haven't seen or played the game yet, what are you doing here?! Go play it 😂
> PolyFury is an intense shmup, you play as a lowly 3-sided regular polygon taking your revenge on the edgier regular polygons (read: regular polygons that have more edges).

Overall thoughts

Of all the game jams I've taken part in, I am by far the most pleased with the final result here. Counting all of the informal 30 minute jams I've done, I have taken part in no less than 18 game jams - and I rarely finish anything with this level of polish. Would you believe that nobody has yet found a single bug?!

That's not to say there are no issues at all, though. People have complained that movement is too fast and precise - I am working on a fix for a releasable version, it changes the controls entirely but I think it works much better. Yes, I know I say I'm going to release a post-jam game every year but ~~I'll totally do it this time I swear~~.

What went right

Big news, I scoped it well! I knew I'd only have a little bit of time to work on it, so I intentionally kept it really small. One "boss" battle, no fancy player movement, you just move around a ring and shoot into the middle.

The graphics are peak programmer art, but really compliment the simple game style I think. Basic shapes can look good (thank you Thomas Was Alone), all you need is a bit of post-processing and some intentionality about it. Take note, programmers! You can make your game look good with basically no effort 😂

Deagle really came through on the audio - the game sounds great, and having actual composed sounds is way better than the generated stuff I otherwise would have done. They also gave me jingles for game over and winning, which I wasn't expecting at all. Seriously, go follow Deagle on SoundCloud because they are awesome 😁

What went wrong

Everyone likes a good disaster story, and this game definitely has a couple. I had so little time to spend on it on account of the fact that I had already committed to working on another game that you should totally play. That meant that all of my "nice to have" features got completely dropped - no superpower for hitting critical spots, no second/third level, no timer, no leaderboard, no continuous testing. All of these would have made the game _much_ better 😬

I also completely neglected the game over/win state UI. It's really, really basic, and I'm not happy with it at all. There wasn't enough time to go back and fill in the graphics options in the menu, so that's empty which feels super un-professional.

And finally, the shooting code is so stupidly over-engineered because I was hoping to get multiple levels done 😭 I spent a good 75% of my time on that code - probably about 8-10 hours, when maybe 3 or 4 would have been fine. Had I spent less time here, I would have been able to address the movement issues or been able to add a few of the other nice to have features.

Next Steps

Ludum Dare falling on the first weekend of October is a huge gift - this month I'm aiming to release 4 commercial games in 4 weeks because I'm just a little bit insane. Getting to take part in LD means I have a solid base to start with, and I get an initial round of feedback 😁 PolyFury will be a mobile game, and I'll be giving a good chunk of profit away to charity - almost certainly the wonderful folks at OneSwitch.

Wrapup

Well, you've made it this far - thank you for reading! As a treat for making it all the way through, drop a link to your game in the comments and I'll make sure I get around to it. I usually fail miserably at actually playing/rating games so having a list will make sure I keep on top of it 😉