Post-Jam Postmortem

Whew.

Turns out trying to make a game in a month, which sounded like a really long jam time compared to, say, a weekend, is still pretty damn hard. I also aimed a little too big, even though I didn't feel like I was at the beginning, and of course life gets in the way, but altogether I had a great time and I'm really glad I just happened to stumble into the jam on day 2. I'm just going to put a few thoughts down now that the jam is fully over about the experience and some of the things I learned making this game.

First, I just want to say I can't believe I got the ratings I did. Big thanks to the jam community for being so positive about this game despite its difficulty, remaining bugs, and the fact that I did all the art in a rush on the second to last day and honestly don't even remember when I did the music, but it's in there so I must have at some point, and it wasn't early. I was shocked to see my game on the first page of the rankings, just outside the top 10, and even in the top 3 of a category (which was Horny, which, you know, I do get it, but still exciting!). Thanks so much to everyone who gave it a try and took the time to rate. Some of you were absolute champions of rating and commenting and I'm amazed and hope that I can do better next time. (I got to 26 which was a few more ratings than my game got so I don't feel terrible, but I do feel like I missed out on so much, which I'm hoping to catch up on now after the jam.)

Okay, I came into the jam a day late so I just sort of ran with the first idea I got: mansion sex party. I initially conceived of the gameplay as being like a top-down Resident Evil but with turn-based RPG sex encounters (the working title was Resident P-in-V-vil, which I still kind of like better even if it is fucking terrible and pretty reductive in terms of sexuality). Quickly I realized I wouldn't have enough time to make a whole top-down world and do what I wanted with the encounters so I hopped to more of a classic PC adventure game style for the exploration. Then about halfway through the jam after spending a ton of time building the encounters I figured out the RPG battle style approach just wasn't any damn fun and there was no time for the level of iteration that only might've made it fun, so I went for simple sequence puzzles. I still think this was the right choice, but the puzzles never got the time they needed to really feel good as you're figuring them out. A big help would've been just not resetting the arousal meter when you make a wrong move, which would be an easy fix but I never thought of until a commenter pointed it out. This all gets even worse in the final boss encounter which becomes a doubly complex puzzle that's even longer than the normal ones, and just...it's rough. Anyway, I hope to do an overhaul to make the whole game friendlier and more fun in the future.

For better or worse a big part of why I didn't have more time to work out problems with the encounters (or implement the deeper interaction during exploring the mansion I originally intended) was I put a lot of time in early on making extra bits like a gallery and an achievement system. On some level I feel like this was "bad" but I still don't regret it because it was some of the most fun I had, especially the achievements. I also managed to get volume controls and a (I think?) fully functional save and load system in. I knew the complexity of the game really demanded being able to step away and come back, but I wasn't sure I could figure out how to do it, so I'm pretty proud of the fact that it seems to work, at least in my testing.

Anyway, this is getting super long and to be a lot more than I intended, almost done though.

The art seems to be pretty well received, which is a huge relief because like I said I smashed through it all at the end of the jam. I tried to just do pixel art but it looked like garbage, so I tried this weird mix of a more paint-like approach and cel shading, then crushed it down to a tiny resolution, then blew that up 2x, and as hacky and cheaty as it is, I think it happened to look pretty decent. I originally had a lot more plans, including the player character and recruits being visible in encounters and having dynamic images depending on what they were doing, but, yeah, come on man, what were you thinking.

I feel like I have a thousand things to say about what I learned using Godot and about game design in general, which I thought a couple weeks of reflection would sort out for me, but yeah I guess not so much. I'm definitely coming back for next year though, and I'm going to aim for something that's a lot less demanding on the player, both in terms of time and difficulty. That was probably the biggest takeaway, which I know is not a new point or anything, but just ideas are a lot bigger and more time consuming than you think they are. Yes, even that one! It's all of them. Game dev is hard.

Well, I can't imagine anyone actually read any of this, let alone all of it, but in case I'm wrong, thanks! Everyone I've interacted with at all in this jam has been super cool and welcoming and supportive and it was just the best to be part of it. I'm planning to get back to work on an improved post-jam build of EWS to at least address the most obvious problems and maybe give the writing a bit of polish since it's all placeholder draft quality, which I definitely didn't realize like two days after submission that I never got to improving. Sooooo...