Learned how important tutorials and letting somebody else play your game is. The game can be great, but if the person playing it gets stuck on the first section since they did not realise a mechanic exists they won't enjoy it. Played a bunch of games here and the game descriptions are a life saver, but having a mechanic be slowly introduced to you makes you feel smart for figuring it out instead of just reading it. TUTORIALS MAN
Ahh I think I know what you're talking about. Your game had an invisible wall which told me I couldn't cross it, but I didn't expect I could go over it until I accidentally discovered how. Many players won't do that and will get discouraged.
A little direction goes a long way, though I agree it's fun to figure things out based on intuition. I like how Valve handles tutorials in their games: they imply what you need to do without interrupting the gameplay.
Very huge learning: Implement the core loop, than add the juice! We started with the basics and than addes the animations and sounds early. As you can see: /jam/theveryseriousjuniperdevgamejam/rate/4712825 we added many animations.. and with every core change we had to find workarounds to not break anything. So for the next time: animation will be the last step :D
If we're talking technical stuff, I've pretty much learned the basics of unity and C# without any prior knowledge. I've also dabbled with music production in Bosca Ceoil Blue, as I really wanted every asset of my game to be handmade by me, which meant I have to create some background music. It was super fun to learn these tools!
Apart from the technical stuff however - I've realised you gotta make your games as accessible as possible. Half of my time spent on the programming and design was thinking how will players react to a feature I'm working on and if they even enjoy it, or is it something that's cool only in my eyes but makes no sense to someone just playing it for a couple of minutes.
Well done learning all that from scratch! It feels great to make something 100% original. I'll have to check out Bosca Caoil; I use LMMS for my music (also free/open source).
I like how you leverage the rules of tetris in your game for accessibility (the way you put a spin on it was also really clever). It's kinda like using chess as a base game; pretty universally understood set of rules that you can build off of.
This being my first game jam, I learned that I really enjoy the spaghetti-code minigames I get to make and signed up for two mor game jams in the future :D
I read documentation about Godot nodes to change details that I never learned about in tutorials. Also I realized that playtest feedback is very valuable to catch problems of any kind and I should spend some more time in testing than I did here. And finally, I learned to engage with game feedback in a healthy way - not taking it personal and letting it affect my feelings, but instead as a way for other people to constructively make my game better!
I learned a bit about publishing a browser game on itch - never put it in fixed 1920x1080 ;) Also implemented Leaderboards which turned out to be pretty straightforward. I also validated that my ideas work - got a lot of positive comments on my game. Finally, I saw that I can make the player feel certain emotions thanks to proper design, which was also reflected in the feedback.
Overall, even though I was quite late to the party I'm glad I joined this as my first Game Jam!
This is my first game jam participation and this is my first somewhat finished game I learned alot mainly, I should not make luck the sole element determining whether a player wins, as that feels unfair. Players should take responsibility for their wins and losses. Luck should be just a part of the game.
So... what did I learn?
Thanks to Juniper and everyone involved for elevating the medium of gamedev to new heights. Hope my little learning thread inspires you all to keep making games!
I've learned that I need to get better at planning that's for sure x,D I actually had a completely different idea at first for this jam and I even started working on it the first day, but I ended up scrapping it for a much simpler one so that was a day wasted. I'm also Incredibly grateful for everyone that gave me feedback, it really helps me to learn so much more than I could on my own and it makes me excited to continue to work on my project!
Mostly about GameMaker Studio's 2 built in physics...and how it might just be more trouble than it's worth than to just manually code everything yourself for a platformer lol. that and some other limitations to do with hitboxes, collision masks, etc. Also that building for html5 can lead to very different results from a simple exe for some reason - apparently something to do with floating point values? Either way, much of my time was spent fine tuning how movement worked which didn't leave much time for any other aspect. I guess at least it's helped me not to be fearful of messing around with things as much.
