Sir Fishbottom and Also Head's TIME MOB: Post Mortem
This is our Jam entry! You can play and judge it here!
The Last Day
The rest of my team was at their day jobs for Monday, the last day of the Jam. The weekend had been tiring for me and my wife, who put in a lot of extra kid duty thanks to this. I hung out for a late morning with her and the kids before getting back to the jam.
When I did get to work it was pretty laid back; tweaking levels and adding some juice to the boost pads. I was on schedule.
Then I spent too much time messing with these keys.
I made them prettier, fiddled with their throw mechanics, fixed their levels up... realized they were only in one level. Oops. So I added in a simple key intro level.
Then I realized the new levels my teammates had made last night could really use an improved follow camera. Working on that camera, adding the title screen, music, pause, clone-clearing, and controls text was a silly rush in the last couple hours. That pile of simple but crucial tasks at the end seems to be a staple of my game jams.
Eric swooped in and created the ending screen / loop counter during a break at some point. Clutch.
And then I made the WebGL build for release... and all of the shaders loaded black and the boost pads didn't work OH NOOO. FEAR.
I lowered the shader model of our toon shader and fixed a framerate dependency in our boost pads and we were good to go.
POST MORTEM
What went well:
Teamwork
It's been five years since I did a game jam. It was nice to work with a team like this again. We made a Trello with all of the gadgets and gameplay ideas. They cranked out game mechanics and levels. It was all I could do to keep up with them. I did spend an inordinate amount of time modeling a fish man though.
Concentrating level art efforts on the levels' gadgets:
We talked a lot of big game about having various themes for the different levels the player visits; time travel, etc. But we didn't really have time for that. Focusing instead on the actual puzzle components made the interactive parts of our levels look a lot better and more understandable. It made gameplay clearer and more physical feeling. The fish reacting to the gadgets with little animations and shouts added to that.
Sound
We can't be judged on audio since the music isn't by us, but I'm really proud of how well it all came together.
Fish voices. I recorded these in my best/worst British fish voice. I feared these would be annoying. They are, but they're also funny enough that people seem to enjoy it. My FishTalkManager code limits the fish clones to greeting each other two times per second, max.
I found it difficult to grunt with an accent.
The warp sound is a few separate tracks of my mouth sounds and a backwards recording of an out of tune electric guitar bass string pluck.
The loungey jazz music works really well with the concept, gameplay, and voices. That MacLeod. He gets it done.
Looping inputs, not physics
We could have made a much more precise puzzle game, but our initial TIME MOB concept had an amusing physical humor to it that we wanted to run with.
So we let the player clones run into each other. They repeat the same actions, but if someone gets in their way or the level is changed by another clone, different things can happen.
Challenges
It's really hard to playtest other people's work while you're working on your own stuff!
Version control is a wonder. But it's also very hard to give immediate feedback on someone else's hot new level when I'd need to stop my work and pull their changes to test it out. In a jam environment, of course teammates want feedback quickly! But I'm just not always ready to stash my work and try it out.
We should have gotten used to simply screen sharing such things with each other as a combo of show-off/review. That would've been fun. Next time!
Scoping art
I kept saying I could record more voice lines, model more characters, paint more textures, etc. It's fun to imagine more jokes / art to work on, especially when talking about ideas with teammates. But it was only 3 days, and I had plenty of other tasks to work on, too.
Overall, it was really refreshing to work on a game jam, even though my day job is also game dev. The pace and the teamwork! It's a rush. And we made a game! And we like it!
Source: ldjam.com archive