Postmortem - Acerola Jam 0

Overview

Overall, I am very happy with what I was able to accomplish in two short weeks.  I thought about what I wanted to accomplish which was developing some core systems for an adventure game and learned a lot about 2D art, as this was my first 2D project in quite some time.

What went well?

I think the development of the world level system and other “databases” for systems was a success.  That now with more time, can use some looking over and be fully fleshed out.  The overall organization of the project and the development of a project from start to finish was refreshing.

The art exploration was a success. I would not call myself a very experienced “artist”, but exploring tools and development frameworks for 2d art pipeline was illuminating.  I was happy with how most things turned out.  Obviously, I know there are quite a few areas of improvements, but churning out this quantity of work in a short amount of time was, to me, a success.

What could be improved?

The gameplay is still… meh.  I really didn’t develop too much of the playable game mechanics until the last day.  And even then, did not get to implement them as much as I had hoped.  I had ideas for what I wanted the game to be.  I let the bigger goals, get in the way of the more tangible areas like gameplay.  I spent a good deal of time developing a saving and loading system and other settings that are for the most part, completely unused or not correctly functional in the final game jam product.

Closing Notes

Again, overall I am pretty satisfied with the production.  As stated, I let some game systems like the saving and loading and settings set up get in the way of the gameplay development, however, I am ok with this because I plan on developing this game a bit further, and I feel like this is an amazing start.  

The game jam helped me push the envelope of what I can accomplish in such a short time.  Below is the daily progress log I kept during the game jam.

Daily Progress Log - Game Jam

Day 1

Did some exploration on 2d sprite shapes and grids.  Going to use isometric grid for cabinet game?

Day 2

Did more Story development , brainstormed some ideas.

Day 3

Tilemap grids testing

Day 4

Space tilemap and grid selector input actions. 

Day 5

• Air tilemap
  • Birds
  • Cloud
  • Airplane
  • Atmosphere 

Day 6

• Github repo setup
• Arcade city design
• Menus creation
  • Main menu
  • Settings menu

Day 7

• Game save loading
• Cinematics database
• Some audio creation

Day 8

• Game save loading fixing
  • And tidying
• Character creator
• And initial test art sizing
• Settings menus
• New game start intro begin play
  • And load from checkpoint 0
• Audio manager
  • Initial setup…
  • Some audio imports

Day 9

• Player movement 
• Sorting layers 
• Ground obstacles
• Pickup s
• Portals 
• Player stats
• Campaign stats
  • Quest stats

Day 10

• Portals cleanup
  • Actually activate new level  game objects and resize camera
• Player script
• World level database
• More player stats
• Audio file dump

Day 11

• Audio manager
• Dialog
• Player movement adjustments

Day 12

• Gateway seal and doors
• Dialog chaining
• GameData Locks and saving/Loading

Day 13

• World Level design
  • Golden box level tilemaps
• Game Mechanics
  • Traps
    • Damaging
    • Healing
    • Teleporting
  • Wave Spawner
• Player Score
• Build Fixes

Day 14

• Upload and build testing
• Quick fixes to wave spawner and added space to be interact with dialog as well