Well hello again everyone, 

I did promise that I would try and continue to do these for each future game jam that I participate in so I am here to make good on that promise. My yearly goal is to attend and make more games than I did the previous year. I decided to attend the “Once A Month # 40” for fun as it's a laidback jam with the wonderful duration of an entire month to put something together. I have always wanted to use assets from Kenney for a game and I thought I could use it as practice in matching style while also restricting my color palette. The Theme was retro so I went with a pixel platformer with a time rewind mechanic. I accomplished the ability to rewind time by storing information about the player in a linked list and when the rewind button was activated it would read the list in reverse until it either reached the end of the list or the player released the button. I am quite happy with the mechanic implementation and most of the level design but I am disappointed with the amount of animation work and sound effects.

 My workflow for the game started out really strong at the beginning of the month as all of the level design and systems were finished within the first three weeks of the jam. I was able to accurately follow the time management goals that I had set in my game design document. I had specifically reserved the last two weeks of the jam for animation and sound effects along with bug fixing. I had forgotten that I had family coming out week four and decided to spend my time with them instead. My deadlines and goals were crippled but I still had a week to recover. Unfortunately, life had other plans as I came down with sickness that did let me get out of going to work, but I was in no shape to continue working on this project. Thankfully I am now fully recovered and I am able to push a few more quality of life changes for this project but I am disappointed that I wasn't able to submit it at the level that I had hoped for.

I feel that I excel at game jams with longer deadlines and I should probably stick to ones that are longer than a week unless I am working with a team or I am able to take time off from my job to do so. I will be participating in another Game Jam “Game Boy Color Jam - Game A Month ” which starts today as I want to make at least one Gameboy game a year. As an added bonus for the first person who comments “Disgrungulated” on the project page comments when it is released I will send them a physical Gameboy cart with the game loaded on it for free if they provide me an address to send it to. 

Thank you for taking the time to read this and hopefully I’ll be back with another post after my next project.