Initial Jam Postmortem

So going into this jam I wanted to challenge myself to try out Godot and make a fun pervy game with my good friend. I'd heard good things about Strawberry Jam and the community and this was a good way to dip my toe in there too. We did some good brainstorming and both started to remember some old commissions I had he made of a bunny girl teasing and  lewding a cute woman and then the warrioware inspiration hit and a plan was in motion.  And it gave me art to work with to get started. Sadly he got pretty busy with paid work so we weren't able to refine the look beyond placeholder art. But at least that placeholder art looks good and I got use out of some ancient commissions

I hit the ground running and with an office theme in mind I found an amazing sale on some pixel assets for creating interiors and I got like 6 packs for under $10. I figured out an office layout I was happy with and started decorating it. And that ended upmaking me remodel like 4 times, but I also got really good at using LDTK  and how to think about and handle layers better with split assets. For a bigger project I would take time to make just one tileset stitched  together from different parts. With the background done it was time to start Godoting.

My first and biggest mistake was setting up 10 location buttons on the menu. From the start Puru and I talked about only focusing on 4 minit games with the month long timeline. But i wanted to lay out all the possible locations I could think of. I meant it more as a hint of like "Oh this is a demo but imagine how cool a full release could be." What it ended up doing was making people think I ran out of time for more mini games and gives the impression I don't know how to scope or plan. (I did run out of time but that was more I forgot to find music and sounds and didn't want to rush a volume slider on the last day) In the future I would just hide those extra buttons so they don't look unlockable.

Once that was done it was time to start on the mini-games and I knocked most of them out pretty fast. Insomnia and excitement meant I had like 70% of the game done in the first week. After that first week I had to slow to a crawl cause of work and life but I still worked every night for a little on the game. I spent time refining the mini games slowly and tweaking values refactoring scripts. Then i got stuck trying to think of the last mini game I really only wanted one button to control the games and also wanted to keep the games from feeling too similar.  In the end I was proud of the inspiration and lewd twist on classic game ideas. "Red light, Green light" became the flash the boss game. The groping in secret in the cubicle was inspired by crafting mini games but thought it would be fun to try and avoid the middle pleasing her too good. The text message was the last game I made and wasn't great but was loosely inspired by a rhythm game. but I suck at those so I went with a sorting sort of idea. Then the game I think had a great idea but poor execution, tug of war in the bathroom. I was actually inspired by fishing games where you reel in the fish but it fights back and if the line snaps you lose.  But I think I needed a lot of tweaks to the struggle mechanics and timers, and really needed to adjust how fast your 'reeling' was. The results screen were next but I was able to get a quick one rigged up to use for both the mini games and the game endings.

Then after making the games I went to add tutorials and that's where my setup kind of kicked my butt. I had to introduce a new scene that all locations needed to try and load and also allow you to skip if you wanted. So I had to redo my scene changing script majorly. It took a bit but I got it patched up, but didn't leave time for making a great tutorial with custom visuals for each game. I just used the same scene and two text boxes one for lore and one for tutorial. In the future I would split those out more clearly 

Coming back to Godot after having some lower level coding using C++ and SDL2 made it much quicker for me to pickup. I also changed my approach to learning it with 4.0 being new I didn't even look at a tutorial. I mostly used documentation and then just figured out things myself. I probably ended up doing a lot of things that aren't considered best practice for Godot. Like I didn't have a single game scene or manager loading other scenes I just used the scene tree to change itself and attach metadata to it for the score. It worked since the small game I wasn't worried about saving or anything like that. Honestly  having a billion nodes drives me crazy, but eh it's fine.  Overall I like Godot but I do think there are some downsides. Working with fonts is a bit of a pain. And you have to do a lot of nesting of properties to get what you want. The biggest issue I have is when it comes to building. Getting it set up for building hurt my brain a bit and made me go look up tutorials. Then getting the web build working took a bit of researching only to have it still break on some linux. And I know it's a Godot issue because I had the same player try out my SDL games and they worked.  Ironically I know that Godot is using emscripten which is what I use too for my C++ games so it has to be how they are doing it or how they are going from GDScript to WASM. 

Overall I consider the prototype a success and I think I'm going to go back to my own little engine again  for future projects. Mostly I like staring at code over fancy visual editors. Next jam I enter will make audio more of a priority, but I hate looking for sounds. I was pleased as a peach with how the game did a good strong launch, and I think this project is one I would come back to when I can afford more art. And spend more time making it scalable but to be fair I just barely figured that out in SDL2