I have been outside the world of game development for just under 2 years at this point. It’s a hobby I keep coming back to but can never seem to fully stick with. I was learning some broader programming architecture, and I figured, might as well use Unity as a tool to test the things I’ve learned, however, I realized that using a test project wasn’t going to cut it, so I decided to join a jam. Trijam 303 looked interesting as I had originally only planned on putting 3 or so hours into my project, but by the end of the jam had gone over the time 10-fold. I used some blender skills I had picked up on for a video project and wanted to attempt to recreate the style of Artic Eggs and Mouth washing, and I believe was mostly successful in doing so. What I’ve come to realize from this project is that in my 4 years off and on of making games I was missing a very crucial piece of strategy. That is make your game structured, when previously approaching games, I would just add what was needed instead of thinking of scalability and the core development principles. Now that I finally approached a project this way, it has not become only easier to work on, but enjoyable. Instead of wrestling with my project to get what I wanted out of it I only had to rely on the design principles and the rest came easy. Game development for me in the past has been easier at the start but quickly spirals into messes of nested code that makes projects near unworkable within a short time span. With this new approach scripting became just another part of game development akin to art and other enjoyable parts of game design, I only had to think of the game I wanted. This, however, is where the game suffers, I thought I understood what a fun game was, but in this I am utterly wrong. What I’ve learned is that creating a game gives a weird dichotomy where you know the ins and outs of it, so it comes naturally to you and as such you make the worst play tester for your own game. So did my teammates as I had shown the game throughout and explained to them how it would work and as such, they played it like how I explained the game would be played and not how someone stumbling across the game would play it. The other take away is make sure your game is a hundred percent ready for launch and make certain that it works. When I published the webport I realized something, in webgl you can’t teleport the player’s cursor. This came as a massive problem seeing as the game originally worked around the cursor being sent back to the middle of the screen after someone stopped looking around. This caused me to change the game to always have the player cursor locked in the middle changing a core of the game’s design. Another problem I ran into was that I didn’t properly test the port and as such wouldn’t realize errors until others pointed them out to me. Such as the screen not being full-screen-able which I only noticed today after watching the jam host play the game. On top of that I ran into several basic issues I should have thought of but was so ready to publish the game that most people played a bugged version of it. On top of that I failed to fully explain the controls leading the same jam host to not move the first couples attempts. While watching the vod I was semi horrified that he wouldn’t figure it out, however, after reading a comment he did. Like before I failed miserably to explain to the player how the game worked and as such they played it in a way which I did not intend which is entirely my fault. On top of this I failed to utilize the foundation of my game. The setup of having to physically look down to clean the mop was a good start but I failed to do more than that. If I were to redo this the player would also have to move the cart with gears and such. Another major design flaw that I realized, but originally considered part of the design was the falling flesh chunks. In my head it made it, so the player had to risk cleaning their mop at the chance of getting hit, however, in gameplay this turned into the player just taking damage without seeing it. On the same note the flesh chunks would be hard to see if impossible to making the game feel more like luck than anything. I also failed to balance the mechanics such that the normal player would experience them all. Such as healing chunks and exploding chunks. I had originally estimated the player would average a score of 100 and as such balanced the game around it, but the average score I saw was 5-15. Making the game very lopsided and boring. As bleak as I might have made this post sound I have only learned from these and after around a 2-year break from game development I am more than happy with this project, I might even say it’s one of my best. I also learned that teamwork for jams is vital for my future jams. I do not have a musical bone in my body and as such can’t make a compelling game soundtrack or sound effects. Working with people Aswell has given me far more insight into the creative process and having someone to shoot ideas off of is invaluable. I am going to start relearning the fundamentals of what makes a game fun and when I do, I will come back with a far greater understanding of game design and feel that my next project will be 2000 times as cool. I’m writing this in a hurry and as such won’t be checking it for spelling and the like so it might be very choppy, but if you’ve read it all the way through thanks and have a great day!