Postmortem

The Epic Megajam 2022 game jam was really fun and the biggest game jam I have participated in. It is always humbling and fun to see how much you really know and how quickly you can apply it. The jam went about as smoothly as it could have. I had an idea and clear goals that I wanted to do and I thought I had a good plan. Unfortunately, I, as many do, underestimated the time it would take to implement these features while also making a “full” game. I am happy with the end result but do feel like I should have set the bar lower and next time I definitely will. Seeing the other entries that have smaller gameplay loops but look 100 times better really opened my eyes to simplicity. 

Another thing I thought was interesting about this jam was the time. At the start of it, I thought that 7 days was a huge amount of time. In previous jams me and another person were able to create a pretty good game in just two days. What I failed to account for was the rest of my life. In the previous jam, I didnt have to work and it was the weekend, so it was a large amount of time we were able to pump into the project. And while I did put as much time as possible as I could, it was often a short burst in between work and school. I definitely wish I had more time, but then again that is the challenge of a jam.

I think the biggest part of the game I struggled with was optimization. I was able to code most of the mechanics I wanted, but the game ended up running like dirt. As I didnt know much about the proper way to implement certain code and how to fix my already existing code, I couldnt really do much about it before the deadline. This is something that I think I can greatly improve upon and do so very quickly. I think I just need to slow down and plan things out a little better next time!