Reflecting on what went wrong.

This game didn't work, and it's the first game in a long time that I'm not proud of.  But I'm not here to mope about it, instead I'm going to discuss what happened, what went wrong, and my key takeaways from this jam.

What went wrong?

I overscoped. I've been doing that a lot lately, and it's rather alarming. This time though, I knew I was overscoping, and did it anyway. I'd hoped that enough sleepless nights would get it to completion, and it almost did. The game is mostly done, and given another day, I would've been able to implement everything. But the key oversight was that it is not the amount of content that matters, but rather the quality of it. I lost sight of that this jam, and ended up churning out twenty odd items, that no-one will ever see. 

I had hoped that polish would save this game, and I'd argue that the game is fairly polished. Blocks have a nice way of inter-connecting and all the UI has slick animations and tooltips and notifications and all sorts of stuff. But most of that polish doesn't make it more fun, it just made for a beautiful mess. The game isn't balanced, and wasn't truly playable until the final day of development. This was my biggest mistake, I underestimated the time it takes to balance a game. Those items mentioned earlier; they're too expensive to buy. And if you did buy them, there'd likely be better things to use. 

The above problems sound like a simple fix, and that's what I'd thought, but there's more than just the pricing. You need to tweak the yield and speed of block breaking. You need to perfect the placement of blocks in the world so that key resources are available when and where you need them. You need to control the pricing so that you can unlock them at the perfect time. There always needs to be a clear, short term goal, something to focus on now. 

The issues extend to the core design idea;

What if we had a survival game but without hunger bars, and instead there was a storm that you had to rewind to escape. 

Restating this plan, it sounds like fun, but the storm ended up feeling like a hunger bar with extra steps. It didn't change the core gameplay, other than forcing you to mine the same things over and over after rewinding. It had some cool potential, like if a machine could auto-rewind time and another could auto-mine, then you could automate resources, but that never came to fruition. Ultimately, the idea didn't change the formula much, and it ended up feeling like a weak clone of better games. 

Lessons learnt

• If you know something is overscoped, don't do it.
• Sleepless nights don't make the game more fun, and nor does extraneous items.
• Save time for balancing, escpecially for a survival game. Balancing is more important than you think. Better balance would've done wonders for making a funner, better paced game.
• Think about the deeper consequences of a mechanic. How does this change the gameplay, and is it making the experience more fun? Does it create interesting consequences?
• Have complete, playable prototypes early on in development. With all the overscoping, this would've been tough to achieve, but I would've found the flaws in gameplay far sooner, and been able to adjust accordingly. 

Conclusion

With that out of the way, I'm eager to move on from this game. I won't be developing it further, but I still learnt some valuable things from this jam. Failure has taught me so much more than success, and I'm now better equipped for future games. I'm also eager to never crunch that hard ever again.

I've also got a huge announcement regarding Hole Punch coming later today, stay tuned.