Post Game Jam Review

Inspiration

While the game ended up mostly as intended, my original idea for the game involved you having to choose from a list of items that the mimic could morph into, rather than just picking from 2, however, I didn't feel like I had the time to do this.  I also figured it would be "endless", however I felt like, again, I didn't have the time to verify that bugs wouldn't occur, or how to keep it interesting.  

The Good...

Though the timeframe for the gamejam was 2 weeks, I started development with a week to go, so I drew up plans with that in mind and I think I got the scope just about right. I only needed to implement a few mechanics, the following with rough development timeframes; 

• Base game scene (5 hours)
• Explorer appears  (2 hours)
• Show choices (5 hours)
• Reaction - Defeat explorer (5 hours)
• Reaction - Take damage (5 hours)

This mean there weren't too many moving parts or states to keep track of, other than randomising the explorers and keeping track of which ones had been played.

This was the most "art" intensive project, in terms of the number of assets to create, however due to the way the scene was set up, I was able to create rough looking sprites at a higher resolution, which when scaled down, looked passable.

The Bad...

Even though I felt the sprites were fairly representative of what they were, and thus made the "correct" choices fairly straightforward, I received some feedback that it was hard to tell what some where. I guess it's easy to become blind to flaws when you're not only designing it, but create it. 

In terms of the gameplay loop, there also isn't much in the way of challenge, but I felt for a game jam this wasn't so much of an issue.

The Future...

I'm not sure this game has much of a development future, which is fine, I think it accomplishes exactly what it needed to. I could tidy the game up a bit, and I think it'd look better with sprites actually designed for a 64x64 screen, rather than the downscaled images used. But I'm not sure that's something I could accomplish myself.

I did think maybe the game could do with different scenes/environments, such as a beach, where you get different explorers, but I'm not sure what that would add with respect to the time it would take.