Hoorah! This is one of the first itchio game jams I've completed in a LONG time. Last one was Snowb4ll Fight for Secret Santa Jam, and that was 2 years ago! I've never really done one of these postmortem things before but I think it'll fun to look back at in the future if I'm still making games by then. Anyways!

Beginnings

I had come hot off the heels of making profile picture party for Pico day, and that game is definitely rough around the edges but I'm still proud of it. I was in a little bit of a high, and wanted to see if I could spit out more projects after. Then came @plufmot with his Pride Month Jam and that seemed like a good excuse. I knew I wanted the game to be about unicorns, because here in New York (and not the rest of the world as far as I'm aware) they are pretty big gay icons. Truthfully I am not super well versed in pride, I'm no activist, so I wanted to lean into more raunchy humor cuz it would be a funny contrast to all the serious games that were to be. It's funny thinking back I was sitting in class supposed to be preparing for finals but I was drawing a unicorn in my math packets shitting out rainbows while screaming.

(early concept sketches for the game ^^^)

Naturally I couldn't do this without my incredible Team Max Hog, and I showed @Tiny the sprites and we gelled pretty well with it. We got my homie @Dryest to make some more music, and he made sure to sample a shit ton of audio clips, my favorite being the one of me saying "Let me be clear, I love dick and balls" from @DemisurgeX's pico day audio skit that I did a line for. We also got my big lardy comrade @TappyWara, as his tiles are none to be trifled with. This was also the first time I'd worked with my pal @MarvelousToastbrand and he fuckin' blew it up with a bunch of help with concept art and miscellaneous sprites!

(mspaint doodles of my ideas for enemies, with Marv's revised concepts!)

Making the game

So before Pico day, I'd been taking baby steps in the Godot game engine, as I was a little constrained by my previous framework HaxeFlixel (<3 to my flixians out there). I undoubtedly believe that after 3 games Godot will be my primary software of choice from now on. It's super light, has really good 2d physics, and most basic functionality is easy to google. It was a no-brainer to use Godot for this game.

I don't really know how much people care about the technical side of making the game, so this section will be brief. Overall the process was smooth, most platformers in Godot are pretty easy to implement and follow strict logic, and I had fun seeing how easy it was to tweak move_and_slide functions on a kinematicbody to bounce off walls. Enemies were a really fast implementation, the main issue with making them was their references to the player would cause the game to crash once they died.

The main challenge in making this was level design, you can have far more much fun at implementation and salivate at the thought of what you can do with the new things you made, but then reach a block of ideas or find cracks in the way you made certain features. The feel I was aiming for was something akin to a type of "speedrun", the kind of satisfaction you get from beating a level all in one go in games like New Super Mario Bros or Battleblock Theater (I played a lot of the latter with my boys @someape and @tappywara to get some ideas). So the mechanic was pretty simple, hold the run button, jump and time lightning perfectly to get to the end. Most levels would start out with me drawing some blocky shape and then seeing what enemies and lasers I could put in to make it harder, and for the most part that process worked. I feel like the more you see a level's terrain the more you can imagine fitting obstacles into it, so if I make more games that require level design I'll be sure to attempt it again.

Thoughts and and a big vat of hindsight

Overall as a short little experience, I'm pretty happy with how SRPT turned out, I had fun both making and playing it as well as cracking goofs with my friends in game. I will always savor the moments of hearing @VoicesByCorey's lines in the game and squealing in laughter and excitement.

That being said, there were things from this jam that I wish I could have done more, so I'll talk about stuff more specific to the game and later more production in general.

For the game itself, I had a lot in mind, and wanted to give the main character a lot more personality and, well, character for my own fulfillment. If I'd allocated more time I would have probably fleshed out the original story I had in mind for the game, and gotten Corey to do way more lines to really bring Softserve the Gwoteicorn to life. Second was just making more. In my personal experience with gamedev, it's really hard to tell when something is enough, whether it be difficulty or content, or worse having to mix the two. I feel like I would have had more levels if I'd just sat down a little longer at my laptop, but who's to say.

Now for production, I've identified habits that I aim to squash like flies the next time around. First being scope creep, part of my disappointment with the character of the game is that I had a whole story in mind where he would travel to different themed levels each with bosses, but that obviously didn't happen. You may get a month to make it, but what really determines the scope of your game I'm finding is mainly your skill and experience. I had a team of one programmer, three artists, and a single musician for this. That is absolutely enough ample hands to get stuff done, but I needed to keep in mind my experience of coding and designing at this point, considering the only game I posted before June was back in February. You look at something from Team Bugulon or Milkbar Lads and the timeframe they had to make their stuff, but their programmers and artists have years of experience under their belt and stuff they've learned along the way. I'm not at that level yet, but I'll die trying to get there if I have to. With the experience factor in mind, scope is something you have to keep mutilating until you have something fun to play that's as small as possible (annoying indie gamedev youtubers call this minimum viable product, or MVP). For now I just need to keep cutting my scope into halves of a half, and if I make the MVP in time and have the rest of the month left, I can add more stuff. The second issue I have with production is just sitting the fuck down. My team and I usually work pretty intermittently with our jobs and commitments, and work calls can quickly devolve into us watching YouTube or some weird shit. In those moments I just need to set a timer and hunker down on doing work, and spending my free time on discord getting shit done.

For now I'm just gonna take a lil break, pretty happy with how many games I've put out in the span of a month, and I want to take the time to learn other engines for work and more collabs. But before this is done I have some thank yous to give:

• A thanks to my awesome friends in Team Max Hog, we rock and hog it out and get better individually with each entry we make, and I will do this until my heart stops beating
• Thank you to @VoicesByCorey, your voicelines were a 1:1 match of what I wanted for the character, and you are a god at the deliveries.
• Thanks to my NG gamedev friends @plufmot and @stepford, was very nice and super encouraging to get your feedback and motivation as I was making all this
• And ofc thank YOU for reading this to the end, if I know one person made it this far, I'll be happy.

Love you newgrounds and I'll see y'all in NYC on July 24th!