Devtober - post mortem

For this game jam, i decided to revive an old project. I had worked on it for a long time early in my game dev "career" (hobby :P) but the scope I had in mind made it a real challenge for me to do alone.

Eventually other projects came up and this got pushed to the back burner. I had always wanted to return to it at some point, but I wasnt sure where to take the game.

I decided to make a vertical slice of my original plan for this jam. Focus on one component, ship battles, and try to explore that aspect further. 

What went right:

The drastically reduced scope helped to keep my motivation up for this project. Since I was a new, solo game dev, I didnt have the experience needed to materialise the idea i had in my head. I still dont think i do, but will hopefully get there eventually.

Since the last time I opened this project, I went through a few game jams, learned new skills and techniques. This helped me identify and change the parts of the project that were in dire need of optimization. I'm still no programming wiz, but it was interesting to see where I was when i made this project and where i am today. More interesting to see what i will be when i eventually flesh this out into a full game!

Bringing in other people also helped me a lot. Being a solo dev can be exhausting since you need to think up and create everything yourself. It was really helpful bouncing ideas off someone else, bringing in some fresh perspective.

What went wrong:

I was hoping to get the ship model looking a lot more realistic. I am not an experienced modeler, and it has been a long time since i modeled anything complex. I made this ship model a long time ago while i was still learning modeling and I didnt have the time to create multiple ships for this jam.

I joined this jam about half way through, so I didnt get a chance the test the game thoroughly. I am sure there are some bugs lingering.

Since this game is not simple to learn, I wanted to make some sort of tutorial - but again, limited on time. Some of the systems may not be intuitive, but i tried my best to make them so.

The code i had written for the original game was atrocious. I had to re-build everything. I am sure future me is already cringing at the 'improvements' i made! haha.

Overall, i am satisfied with what i achieved in the past 18 or so days. I learned a lot about the bad practices i used to have but never identified. Ended up with a somewhat fun game :P

I want to thank Moustronaut for the amazing music he composed.
And Captain Squoze for helping with level design and assembling the port assets.