And so the Game Jam has finished, I’ve had a chance to relax and started looking through all the many other games have been made. The done thing is to now post a retrospective on the competition; spoilers it was a blast π

First the good:
Theme(s) I enjoy the excitement of waiting for the final theme to be announced and often have several game ideas bouncing around for many of the suggested themes. During this Ludum Dare there were dozens of themes that I liked the sound of so I did the sensible thing and combined them together into a project I was enthusiastic about. π The final theme ‘You are the monster’ was simply the icing on the cake as I am fond of the likes of the Zerg or Tyrannids in strategy games. Being alien monsters is just fun π
Clear planning of code structure I have learnt so much since first starting off coding in Dark Basics years and years ago. This project was a chance for me to test my skills and show to myself that I can create something as challenging as the engine structure to a whole RTS. Overjoyed at managing to achieve this level of smoothly operating complex system. I had a mental plan of action and was able to churn out nearly all of it in a short space of time.
Achieving new programming challenges So many things in this game are novel for me; first Javascript game that is hosted and embedded into another webpage, team based effort with multiple people’s art/music assets, sprites with rotation, heck I don’t think I had ever used premade images in a Javascript project before π Onwards and upwards!
Delivering a team based project This was a big one for me as I haven’t had much experience doing an interdisciplinary project before. Having to coordinate artists and musicians was a new challenge (even if they were my siblings :P) and it was more complex than working solo. The finished project is much richer for their efforts though and I feel everyone delivered some stellar work.
The not-so-good:
The genre of RTS is hard It was a real struggle to include everything I wanted into the interface of the game and I was always realizing I was missing something integral to making the game playable D: The game mechanics were all in pretty early but there are so many feedback systems needed to make the gameplay understandable. I feel like I could have done a better job on making the system transparent and fell into the trap of assuming players would be familiar with the control system I was going for -_-‘ Next time I’ll aim for a more intuitive experience.
Using pure Javascript This one is two-fold, firstly the coding I have done most recently has been in Java so my Javascript is a little rusty. I had to spend a lot of time looking at online reference materials and checking old code snippets for how to do things. Whilst part of me enjoys making programs from scratch another part of me knows that I would be much more productive using a pre-made engine. I keep wanting to get into using Unity, I just want a little longer to figure out the fundamentals ok? π
Aiming for two competitions at once Initially I wanted to attempt both the solo competition and the game Jam, probably because I only had experience of the solo compo and wanted to achieve that feeling of managing accomplish everything myself again. Essentially I got greedy… What this meant is that I spent a lot of time working on assets which ended up completely replaced in the Jam version. It would have been better if I had been incorporating my collaborators work from the outset. It was much nicer to see the program with all the aesthetic choices added and made motivating myself to finish easier
Using art/music assets had some unexpected pitfalls, I had to take into account that the assets took much more time to load than code source files. There were some issues with some browsers not being able to decode the sound files too.
Time management No surprises that this is here π Two/Three days is an awfully short time span to complete anything. Whilst I feel I managed to implement most of the features I wanted so much content was left on the cutting room floor; levels, dialogue boxes, more terrain features, some AI. What we managed to produce was more of a minimum viable product albeit a very nice looking and sounding one. With some more time this code base could be so much more. Next time I will probably allocate more time to planning and implementing game scenarios. Also sleep, goodness I was so exhausted as soon into the contest as Sunday :/
In conclusion. It was such a rewarding effort to take part, for the swarm! π
(sorry for the wall of text here…)