(EN US) Post-Jam Update and Post-Mortem Devlog -J G Borges

My greetings to any and all who might be reading! I hope you are having a pleasant day, night or evening!

My name is João Guilherme Borges and I was a game designer and the programmer in this little game jam project developed for Gbjam 11 called Space Wanderer! 

Now that the voting period for the jam is over (thank you to all who particpated or voted in the jam!), we can finally add some of the missing features that had to be cut from our little game due to time constraints. I had a hard time classifying this post because it is part an update on the added features and part a small postmortem of the game but I'll try to keep it brief.

First, a brief post-mortem from my perspective as game designer and programmer:

I'd like to start by mentioning that this team was the largest team I've ever worked in a project with (6 whole people! I know it's not much but it is to me!) and this experience of working with this larger group was really fufilling. It feels very validating to see all these people working together to acheive a shared goal and I'd like to formally thank Beatriz,  Gwen, Nicolas, Rafael and Rafael for being such cooperative and enthusiastic teammates! I'd also like to thank Nicolas more specifically for inviting me to participate in this jam! 

This jam, though very rewarding, was also an experience that taught me a lot about manageing my expectations for myself and about the proper way to plan around working with so many people. As you may have noticed if you've visited the main page of Space Wanderer, I was the sole programmer of this project. This meant that, while we had 5 people who were creating content for the game, there was one person to implement it. Having never worked in a group this large before I had never been in a situation where I was the bottleneck to a production before and, since our original idea was quite ambicious (6 full levels, as oposed to the one that wound up in the game), I ended up having to cut a lot of the game down in the last minute, including art, music and levels that had already been made by my colegues but were yet to be implemented in the final game. Had I noticed that the scope of the game was unachievable earlier on given our time constraints, a lot of time that was spent making mechanics that would appear in later levels that never made it in would have been spent implementing content that could feasably make it in time and make the game we delivered a little more polished. This wasn't the most comfortable position to be in, but one that has taught me a lot about the importance of planning ahead and about my own limits of what I can do within a given time. 

This game was also one of huge successes! This game had the most complicated mechanics I've worked with and overcoming that challange has definitely made me a better programmer and a better designer. This is also, by far, the most polished game I've worked on and that is thanks entirely to the rest of the team who did an outstanding job in all areas of this game! The art, the sounds, the music the levels and the support were all on another level and I can't thank you enough for being so passionate and so commited! 

Well, that's the end of my "little" post-mortem, hope it was enjoyable to read. Now with the update (maybe these should have been two separate posts...).

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------Update------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

New

- Two new levels fully implemented.

- New colour pallete for level 3

- Two types of boxes to carry

- Level hazards

- Respawn and checkpoints 

- The game is now fully controller-compatible

Bug fixes

- The music no longer restarts when switching between perspectives

Known bugs

- When switching between perspectives, the wrong version of Steve flashes on screen before the next scene is loaded

- Steve can go inside of walls when switching between perspectives.

- There is a section in level two in which player can get soft-locked if they don't take the box with them to the other side of the wall.