Postmortem: Flower Shop

The first jam

So this is the first jam i ever attended and in fact the first time i actually tried to develop a game besides the occasional tutorials :)

I have a development background at enterprise software so coding itself wasn‘t the biggest problem but the different approach to games and game engines did gave me some trouble as you will see later.

I was joined by my wife which made most of the graphics.

Growth as a theme

The theme of the Gogodot Jam was Growth. At first i had surprisingly no real idea. The theme covers such a broad spectrum of possibilities that i was overwhelmed. After a few discussions we agreed on something that resembles Overcooked which we both loved to play. In this game you have to server food to customers at fast as possible which always ends in absolute chaos.

So the idea of a flower shop was born where you as the shopkeeper have to fulfill the orders in a time restricted environment.

What went well

We had a lot of fun:

First and foremost we had much fun together and i believe that is one of the most important aspects if somebody joins a jam.

We learned much:

That is my second most important point. I attended the jame just to have a good reason to lern more about game development and godot in particular. Also my wife wanted to do some pixel art and learn more about that topic.

It worked for both of us very well.

We finished it:

While this sounds obvious it is an achievement in my eyes. There are 183 submitted entries but i somewhere over 750 sign ups. So finishing it in time is definitely something to be proud of and we are.

The game actually makes fun ( in our opinion :) ):

While this is of course subjective we had fun playing are own game and others seemed to have fun as well as we read in the comments. That made us very very happy

We adapted our content to the time we had

You can read more on that in the next part. But we successfully managed to cut parts of our games to make it for the jam.

What didn‘t work out

Our initial scope was way way way too much

Initially our concept had multiple other variants of plants, many more tools, customer npcs, light, rain etc…

To sum up way too big for the first project in a limited amount of time. While 1 week sounds long and in my opinion is enough time for a jam we also had our jobs, our kid and other family activities. So we could really only work on the game in the evenings and the weekend.

It would have been better to focus on the main element first and only add other features if there is enough time left. So in our case polish the core loop which is planting and watering the flowers.

The big initial scope also lead to the second problem.

Clean Code doesn‘t matter in game jams

As i said at the beginning i have a professional developer background. As part of my job i am used to carefully design and structure the code so it stays maintainable.

But this approach takes time and knowledge. 

As said above we didn‘t have enough time and i was missing the knowledge in game development that i would need the design it in a clear way.

But to be frank i think it isn‘t needed. It‘s not like you keep working on the project for a long time. It was exactly one week and it would have been perfectly fine to just add code and make sure it works.

Instead i „wasted“ one and a half day trying to figure out what the best way to implement something would be. It would have been better to just make work good enough.

Make a better project planning

Or make a plan at all. I didn‘t put much time in planning out the project but just started with it. While it worked out i would have been more focused if i wrote down what i had to do in which order and work with that.

Conclusion

After all it was a really enjoyable experience and i am sure that this won‘t be my last jam. :)