Tower Punch Post-Mortem

As those that are reading this can probably tell, this is the Post-Mortem for Tower Punch, a game that was developed during the 7 Day Game Dev Tv 2023 Spring Game Jam.  Originally, I did plan to participate in the game jam with a bunch of friends but unfortunately noone was available to join me on working on the project.  I plan to use this document to examine what went wrong, what went well and how to improve in the future. 

Let me start off by going over what went well with this project even through it will probably end up being the shortest section. First, I did have quite a bit for fun playing other people's submissions to the game jam. While this doesn't really have much barring on the project itself, I still wanted to add it. Second, the wall jumping mechanics and void shifting were completed without too many bugs making their way into having to be patched out during the Jam. I was also happy with getting a completed game submitted and achieving my goal of reaching the top 50 % of ratings for all submissions. (I ended up in the upper 100s out of about 1000 submissions or around the top 80% XD) I also found a list of a few great free resources that I can use for future projects as well.

Now let's move onto issues that I ran into during the jam. My biggest complaint is my use of time management during this project. I was given a solid seven days to work on completing this project and I would be hard pressed to have raked in over eight to twelve hours of work. The theme for the jam wasn't very interesting to me and my friends that I hoped to join me would not be joining me, so I spent a good two days waffling around with what concept to use and if I would even participate in the jam as a solo team. When I finally did decide to participate, I built a prototype that Saturday-Sunday and left it mostly untouched until the following weekend even though I had an additional day off. I believe it might have been a side effect of me setting a goal to make it into the top 50 % of admissions and thinking "This is good enough" instead of "How can I make this the best It can be".  It's not like I ran out for time due to the deadline but mostly because of my one poor time management, the holiday did not help things either. I even programmed a system for multiple key blocks and drew out more levels but didn't fully implement them. I also should have allotted more time for play testing as the third level was way too hard and the lives system super punishing. The boss fight at the end originally was supposed to have the player chuck boxes at the boss to deal damage. I also lacked a splash screen, thumbnail images and pretty much anything for marketing purposes. Thankfully I used the power of the community forum to secure plays, ratings and reviews. If I had employed better marketing like some of the other entries, I wouldn't have had to brute force my way into getting people interested into playing and reviewing my game. I also discovered in the ultimate marketing fail of all, my company name, Shattered Games LLC is already taken on itch.io so I guess I will just be "The Birderer" on this website. I actually have my own website for my company and need to add it into my account as well.  My credits screen was also a mess and only after the fact did, I realize that a bunch of the credit links where not working because of how they were copy and pasted into the project.

This section will contain key takeaways and things that I wish to incorporate in my next project.  Starting with the basics I want to have a fully polished splash screen and credits page. I also pledge to use my time far more efficiently and shoot for the number one slot!  I also really want to make all the image assets for the next game from scratch rather than using and editing premade ones. Lastly, I think I will attend the next one by using Unity and compiling in Web GL as games that could be hosted on the website received far more attention because you didn't have to download anything! 

 This was a fun project to work on and my first Game Jam and I hope to attend a lot more in the future!

The Birderer