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I DID IT AGAIN! 

 

 

 

SUMMARY

1. A game jam!
2. Play the result here! 
3. Puns are powerful and must be respected
4. "More features" are not always "more fun"

 

So gamedev.tv announced their second game jam, and I entered and submitted. Not entirely because of the free course (which was a nice incentive) but as I've mentioned before, my gamedev time is very tightly corralled by the obligations of having a full time job and a family, and the high intensity shorter time jams are just not really workable for me. 

Anyway! I enjoyed it last time and produced something I'm not ashamed of, so WHY NOT EH? 

 

 

idea, planning, goals 

 

The theme this time round was 'the last stand', which was perhaps as open ended as last year's. 
This is okay! My idea was to take the concept of 'stand' semi literally.  something standing, you have to knock over. 
How about a water tower. or better yet, a milk tower.  how about you're a cow who wants to knock over a tower of stolen milk? 

As last time, the key goal for me was to finish, to have something complete, playable with all the key features present and correct.  

I was also looking to stretch myself- I've learned a lot in the past year (even though visible output is minimal) and having something to demonstrate it would be nice. in theory, this should translate to better scores. 

 

                        

 

what went well

 

As before, planning planning planning.  time is 100% the limiting factor here and it must be used effectively.  also! unlike last time, the scale of attendance and rating wouldn't catch me off-guard, so 'marketing' wasn't left to the last second. 

Structuring the game's code more efficiently meant I was able to do more with less. 
e.g. the character movement and control code for the player and the chasing enemies is almost identical- the main difference being that the player control receives input from the keyboard, whereas the enemy control input is calculated based on the player position relative to the enemy, with crude wall detection. 

Similarly, I was able to implement three semi-distinct playable characters and procedural random level generation with a small amount of effort. 

 

                

 

All this is kinda moot though, because my unprovable gut feeling is that the main driver of success here was having a presentable splash screen and a very punny name.  

 

 

This is a great name imo, because it's got a pun, which everyone claims to hate but secretly loves, and is attention-grabbingly weird. Even if the idea of a game about animal teats doesn't appeal, you're still going to check it out because what on earth is it going to be? 

 

what went less well 

 

Turns out doing things the proper way has its downsides! A lot of the effort is front-loaded so the first half of my time I felt like I was going at a snails pace, achieving much less in the same time as last year. it was only in the last third or quarter that I was able to really scale up the rate of progress, thanks entirely to the earlier groundwork.  Unfortunately, a few 'nice to have' features ended up getting abandoned as I'd underbudgeted time to get the prototype up and running. 

Those 'nice to have' features include a background that's not offensive to the eye, so all's well as long as you try not to look at 50% of the screen while you play. 

 

 

 

                

 

on the graphical side the default resolution is some really weird value that's far too large and I was too deep in to change it without upsetting the sprite window size ratio and parallax scrolling. WHOOPS. 

This was the first time I'd used godot 4, as opposed to godot3, which is 99% the same, but has little things here and there that are just different enough to trip you up. 

and also a personal note! I did stretch myself, I'm happier with the state of the code as opposed to last entry, but I'm not convinced it's a better game. you know, more fun  It's also another platformer.  If I want to really extend myself, I need to try another genre.

 

 

results

 

Despite the final product being about on-par (in my opinion) with last year's entry, it performed far better! , unlike last year's 15 ratings, we received 25 ratings.  The average this time round was 12.6 ratings, and the mean was 7 ratings.  Once again this is a sign that a few heavy hitters were skewing the average up. The quantity of this year's submissions was slightly greater than last year's, up to about 1,120. 
As last year, this is an insane number of games to rifle through- I couldn't find time to play and fairly rate less than twenty- just like last year, discovery is King. 

I think we did alright this time round! no matter what way you cut it, we got way more than our 'fair share' of attention! 

Does this reflect a 'better game'? not really! but absolutely worth remembering that the game market is absurdly crowded, and getting people to even minimally engage with your game is not easy and pretty important! 

 

ratings

 

see here, as tables are broken

 

Rating Distribution

 

• 5 star - 20%
• 4 star - 26%
• 3 star - 32.5%
• 2 star - 15%
• 1 star - 6.5%

 

I'm okay with these numbers! the game is FUN and sits in the top 10% of FUN NESS with all other categories (save for theme) sitting nicely somewhere in the top quartile region.  The mechanics score here reflecting the healthy jankiness in the submission. 
The standout here is how 'poorly' we score in the theme category which is still better than half of entries, and imo we probably deserved a lower ranking how obtuse I was with it. 

That being said, this is still very much a jam targeted at more inexperienced devs, so rankings are not a true reflection of the submission when compared with other content on itch! 
The star rankings here are maybe more helpful, deeming us comfortably mediocre. 

This is both affirming "I made an averageish game in ten lunch breaks" and grounding "I still have so much to learn" 

 

 

future

 

So real talk- there's a reason 'feature creep' is a dirty word.  It'd be awfully tempting to say "wouldn't it be SO MUCH BETTER if I just spent. a couple of hours adding X?" and maybe it would! but my time is precious, and I'm not convinced that the fundamental core of the game is strong enough to justify more work on it. so if you were looking for more physics-based cow action, maybe don't get your hopes up.  

if there *are* changes or upgrades, they'll have to provide value to me to make it worthwhile me working on it.  I don't mean money! I'm more thinking if I want to try out new techniques or add a feature as a learning exercise, I can maybe justify it, but I'm pretty unlikely to be working on udder chaos purely as a labour of love. 

 

        

 

Unless it's fixing this awful tileset.  I mean goddamn.

 

                        

 

Thanks for reading, if you played, thanks for playing! If you rated, thanks for rating!