Finished another jam entry, called it Into The Web Of Swine. It isn't my crown achievement by any stretch of the word, but I do have feelings of pride based about it.

The Start

I've been trying to improve production habits with jams because I identify a lot of my issues when it comes to getting work done, and when I found out about the mobile jam I was more than ready to join in order to squash those behaviors. I'll get more into the production part in the next section, but first I'll start with the concepts. Coming up with the idea for this game was actually a lot of fun, usually it's me bashing my head against a wall until I think of something, but this time I scheduled a call with my Team Max Hog pals: @MarvelousToastbrand, @Tiny, @SomeApe, and @TappyWara. We booted up an aggie.io session and started coming up to whatever thoughts came into our heads.

(The final png of all the doodles)

The theme the jam was given was "Lots Of Them", and a thing I love to do in any themed jam is break down a phrase and find ancillary extra definitions of a word in the dictionary. so with a quick google I found out that "Lot" has an extra meaning as a noun:

So we eventually concluded on the idea that the game would be about a hacker who stole people's data and auctioned it off as a lot to the highest bidder, which if you've actually played the game there would be no way that was communicated, which was due to a production problem I'll identify in the next section.

Makings And Such

I mentioned in my previous postmortem on how my main issue was "sitting the fuck down", and I think this time around I got better. I'd estimate the time I spent working on this was a week total. The main thorn in my side that I need to take care of now is SCOPE and making it smaller. Obviously the game as it is doesn't really reflect the original idea that we wanted to communicate, and that was because I foolishly believed that it was possible for one programmer to do. When I began I got demotivated really quickly, but then felt a second wind and pushed through until I was able to put something out. Next jam I do will NOT be as wild, I really need to cut it down into an eighth of the original idea so I don't get disappointed with the next project. However, I'm still really glad I got this done. Usually when I get demotivated in a jam I don't pull through and just work on something for longer, but this time around I made something in the span of a week even after experiencing the shame of almost quitting. I don't expect any prize for this, but I'm really glad I was able to implement the things the game has already so quickly like the upgrades, enemies, and scoreboard integration with the NG API, which I'd never done before. I was especially appreciative for my pals @TappyWara and @SomeApe, who helped me out with art to pull through and finish.

Thoughts And Brain-Thinks

My main source of pride for the game isn't even the game itself, but really just that I got it done in the time I did. And yeah it sounds a little sordid even to myself, but looking back at my timeline of stuff I made this year it's really great to see my timespans to make projects is getting smaller.

1. Zoo Game, took 5 months (mainly out of laziness, my greatest shame)
2. Profile Picture Party, took 3/4 of a month
3. Sh*t Rainbows Piss Thunder, took half a month
4. Into The Web Of Swine, took a week

So with that, I'd say there's still a personal trophy I can extrapolate from making this, and I'm glad I finished it.

With the final bit here, I'd like to talk about something I experience here (and other sites as well) when it comes to publishing and sharing stuff. That being, FUCK NUMBERS. Regardless of where they come from, they will either make you or break you, and watching a score slowly mellow out on your game is something hard to turn your brain off from. Don't let those numbers into your thoughts, just take what you've enjoyed from making your project and don't like a decimal drop plague your thoughts about how you could of done stuff different. It's pretty self-explanatory and many have said it before but it always needs reiteration.

To close off, I'd like to give some thank you's:

• Thank you to my homies @TappyWara and @SomeApe again for helping me with the remainder of the art, was great finishing this with you guys
• Thanks to @dry for the tunes, very appreciative you still took time to work with the hog boys while you were doing all of your other entries.
• Thanks to @Tiny, though you weren't able to art after I had started again your help with the concepts and ideas were awesome
• Thanks to the Godot devs, mobile was easy af and only took like 4 extra lines of code to make it compatible for both platforms.
• Again, thanks to YOU for reading this, I'm very glad you care enough to read my thoughts

I don't really have any other big news other than I have one more project to do and then you won't see much of me in the next 3 months. My life is getting very hectic around that time and I won't be able to do games during it, but I'll be very excited to come back running. Bye!