They say that too many jams will spoil the broth but bring us so much love. I'd like to hope that's true! I dived headfirst into game dev for the first time (minus a failed faffing about a few years ago). It's been about a month and I've now completed three game jams.

that's too many jams

 I was hoping to delay my start on Juice Jam #3 that just wrapped up last week, and use a few days to do that and work on this jam at the same time with the same game. Sadly, or fortunately, I fell in love with my game for that jam (Honeybutter), and had to see that one through. I pushed myself way too hard to get that one done, so when all was said and done I had just a few days left - basically thursday through today, sunday. 

When GoedWare Jam's theme was announced, I pretty quickly got the idea for Enhanceomancer and had marinated on it a bit. It seemed both small enough in scope and easy enough to do, my first game having also been a topdown shooter that I learned a ton from. I really enjoy roguelike games but find the decision points can sometimes be too few and far between and can easily be uninteresting, and Enhanceomancer was a desire to see just how often you can give players an upgrade, and ones that are exciting and cool at that.

I also love games that let you build your own difficulty level a la Supergiant games' library, and that's where the idea came in - one upgrade for yourself, one for your enemies. And if the player is going to get huge exciting upgrades, the enemies should too - and game pace things could or should be controlled by the player. So the game does no scaling whatsoever, it's all based on the player's choices. Tying the player buffs to the enemy buffs seemed like a great way to add some serious crunch to that decision.

Well, I don't think I succeed at actually getting huge exciting upgrades in. I had all these "simple" ideas, like being able to adjust most stats, add a damaging aura, aoe damage to your attacks, moves that alter your dash, an upgrade that gives you a body double, etc.. the kinds of things you can build different runs around. I wanted to have at least a few shells of an enemy - with different ai. Development took a lot longer than I had hoped - I'm still continually overestimating how quickly I can get work done!

In the end I delivered something that I think gives a taste of what my vision was and I'm pretty fond of it.

I let myself pursue a lot of things during my time on this that were probably not wisely spent. The hours it took to get the ai working and debugged, well, didn't fully succeed and possibly left enemies that are less interesting than ones that would simply move to the player and shoot. I spent a bunch of time customizing my character on this site which I think was a waste - it's definitely far too stiff a character model for my style. Part of the problem was wanting to use the tileset I did, which is 32ppu in size where most art is 16ppu. Finding something that didn't clash with it was a lot of work. Ultimately I like the look of the game, but I don't love it, and there were a lot of hours wasted not succeeding. I know you can make a very nice looking game with just simple shapes and lots of post processing and shaders, but I'm very resistant to that path for no particular reason. This game could've been a great fit for that I think and the extra time I gained there would've let me get in some of the ideas I was most excited about.

Another visual thing that ate up a lot more time than I expected was all the juice I heaped  on the effects. Having just done the juice jam I wanted to make sure I kept up that level of quality, and in this case I think it was completely worth it. The feel of the player's weapon is just so damn satisfying to me, whereas before I added all the effects it felt weak and lifeless. I had decided on adding critical hits early on, and needed to make sure they felt huge and special and exciting, and I think they do.

My past two games I spent a lot of time getting accessibility options, and well, an options menu in at all. I think I made the right call in cutting my options menu dreams, and especially in cutting trying to get a main menu in. The more game jam games I play the less important that stuff actually seems to be, and also more importantly: people don't tend to look for options. It was a little frustrating seeing a bunch of comments complaining about difficulty they could easily change themselves, had they known. Unlike my other two games, this one puts control of the difficulty squarely in the hands of the player through the main gameplay.

I was ready to submit a less than great version of my game at 3pm today, but found the jam extended two hours - and I spent that time hard at work debugging and polishing, and at 5pm I was ready to submit only to see another 30 minute extension. I took that time for some less-critical things like adding some visual variety to the ground and a shadow for the player.  I probably could have used that time to get in some more gameplay affecting buffs, but what if they hadn't worked or had been buggy? I went with the safe choice and I hope people find my game fun enough to not mind. 

All in all this last month has been a whirlwind of long long days doing nothing but making games and it's been a total blast, and I feel like I'm learning a ton from each project. I'm not going to lie, I'm really proud of myself for getting three games done in 30 days, basically relearning coding/c# and unity from scratch. This jam was a really fun way to cap that off, I love the theme of enhance and I like to share some of the deeper thoughts with people that devlogs require. There are so many tiny choices you make while putting a game together, and one thing I've learned from a decade of being a classical musician, making each of those choices intentionally is the way to  actually make something great. I don't know if I succeeded with that, but I look forward to seeing all the thought that went into everyone else's work! :)