Post-Mortem

Day 1: The theme „Out of control“ was announced at 9 pm my time. Plan for Friday was to come up with an idea and write down a structured plan. We brainstormed together with my girlfriend and finally I settled on an idea of „controlling“ a plane and emergency landing. I prepared tasks and time allocation for each part of development like coding, art, sound etc…Then I called it a day.

Day 2: I spent most of the morning with my family and I made a quick placeholder model for the plane. After lunch I dived deep into coding. The main idea of „gliding“ to a safety zone with the plane turned out to be too much for me. I spent half a day trying to get it work but at the end of the day I realized I can’t spend more time on this. I quickly modeled 5 modular map tiles and made a semi random map generator. Time pressure and motivation crisis hit me and I decided to take a break for the evening.

Day 3: I estimated rest of the „should have“ features to 9 hours of work but I could be working only for 7 hours. It was time to let go of some of my ideas and keep only essentials. In the morning I recorded and tuned the voice-acting and then I simplified the „gliding“ physics to slowly descent and limit the movement only on vertical axis. This way I ensured, players couldn’t fly out of the map. My girlfriend meanwhile enjoyed Bosca Ceoil and made the background tune. I had only 4 hours left when I started animating the intro scene and glueing together audio manager and scene transitions. I felt very motivated and I did twice the work than on day 2. In the last hour I remade the plane model, added some nice effects (air around wings, post processing etc.) that made the game looked prettier and at 8:45 pm (deadline was at 9 pm) I started building the game and writing the game page. At 8:52 pm my computer went down and I lost some unsaved work…pretty stressful last minutes but I managed to submit the game 2 minutes before deadline!

What went right

• Dialogue system
• Overall aesthetics 
• Planning and time management

What went wrong

• No web build and poor game page
• Game idea was poor and base mechanic had to be simplified
• I got stuck with coding and then I had less time for art / animations and scenes

Overall

I think I worked for 16 hours, probably a little more. I’m satisfied with the final result and the project planning but I dislike the game concept and theme compliance. It was hard for me to come up with the concept this time but I was bold enough to try new things like intro and random dialogues. 

This game jam taught me that I’m able to work around a massive game mechanic failure and that I should not spend too much time working on something that seems to be important but is not.