Game development continued

2025-02-05

Following up on my last post about the Mini Jame Gam #38, I wanted to reflect on the jam and revisit my game development ambitions. I structured this post as a simple retrospective listing what went well, what can be improved and what actions I am going to take from here on.

What went well?

I managed to submit the game a bit over a minute before the jam closed. That was cutting it close, but I had automated the deployment process to itch.io sufficiently to take that risk to add a bunch of actual content in the last hour. So yay, I actually finished something! 🥳

You can play the finished game called Nimble Journey on its itch.io page.

The most rewarding aspect was that it was really fun to work on this. The jam's theme theft and special object, a hat, provided helpful limitations on what to build.

I included basic 3rd party assets like pixel art animated sprites and some sound effects. This is also reflected in the review comments by other jammers like:

Love the visuals, and the sfx hit in just the right way!

I liked the SFX and the stealing hat interface! […] Cool pixel art btw!

Of course, those are 3rd party assets, so I can only take credit for choosing and arranging them. The feedback nonetheless shows that my decision to at least pay attention to that aspect was valuable.

Also it was fun to learn about rudimentary game audio in Bevy.

Streaming the jam was a great way to keep myself focused. I managed to stay on task for the full time without straying into major tangents – let's ignore the 1 hour session to package itch.io's CLI tool butler in Nix 🙈. Naturally, I also took a few healthy breaks. The stream basically served as a way to do body doubling.

What can be improved?

There are some limits to what can be done in three days and my scope for the project quickly shrunk over the course of the jam. 😅 I do not think this can really be fixed, but adjusting expectations accordingly makes sense.

The Bevy game engine was fairly new to me and I think the process of learning it slowed me down compared to using a familiar engine. Then again, I had not done any game development in the past years, so there was arguably not much of an alternative. This should improve with practice. That being said, I am quite happy with the engine's API. I like the code focus, that no level editor is yelling at me to click buttons all the time. That is probably also a reason why I never got deeply into engines like Unity or Godot. They are just not my cup of tea.

There were some glitches left in the end. Some intentional, others not so much. Play testing revealed that for many people, the core mechanic was fairly hard to figure out. The level was also unfinished and allowed players to walk off the sides of the platform into a grey void. I found this out through irl play-testing and it is also clear in the reviews:

I don't think there are any boundaries so the player can just wander off lol. […]

I press E but nothing happens

While developing on stream was helpful, I also think it made be quite self-conscious about what exactly I was doing, feel a need to explain everything to potential viewers. So overall it was a bit more stress and effort than casual offline development. Definitely not a good default mode of work, but I think it is nice to stream development on occasion.

What now?

Overall, I am quite happy with that little kick-off to get back into game development. I want to take game development more seriously and will continue to invest time into it. This will include developing an idea for a game, developing small prototypes and figure out the business side of things like marketing and finances.

And then hopefully, I will have a plan for a game soon to present.

Until then, thanks for reading my little game jam retrospective!