Postmortem: Quack Circuits / Godot WIld Jam 72

The ratings are in, and Quack Circuits… ranked near the bottom in most categories (there were 156 submissions).

Getting 21st in “originality” suits me just fine though– that (or whatever similar category is available, like “innovation”) is usually where I do best, and doing well there is the kind of thing that makes me think I have something to contribute to the game dev world.

The comments were generally positive, which isn’t unusual– game jam participants are a friendly bunch.

For 8 of the 9 days of the jam, I was working on a fairly straightforward puzzle game. In the final 24 hours, I pivoted to making the puzzles a mini-game in a larger story of a duck trying to escape… something (in my mind, it was an animal testing lab, but that never made it to the final product). Would it have ranked higher if I spent that last day refining the puzzle game? Maybe? I can’t know.

One thing I did for the first time, was get deployment nailed down first. Before I wrote a line of game code, I had the base project all set up with Github Actions and successfully deploying the base project to itch.io. I’ll definitely keep doing that for future projects.

So, I had a serviceable puzzle game. The feedback in the Karchner household was pretty much:

That’s boring. You should make the game less boring.

So now, the puzzles are a minigame in a larger… duck….quest.. thing. I wouldn’t exactly say it works. But it kind of works?

I still like the puzzles.

Despite previous predictions, I haven’t gotten a chance to work on improving the art and adding sound, music, polish, etc yet. I’ve got until 4pm Sunday to make improvements.

But, I can at least call it a game now! There are three puzzles. I think that’s enough for a jam entry.

It’s not a game yet– but it’s interactive! By tomorrow night, I should be able to have a couple of playable levels, and that will leave me most of a week (including the weekend) to focus on improving the graphics, adding sound, and other fit-and-finish work.

A feeble #screenshotsaturday for my Godot Wild Jam work in progress. The current idea is something like Pipe Mania meets Snap Crcuits. This screenshot does not convey any of that, but I did get to the point where the game can detect whether a complete circuit has been made and react accordingly.

The theme is out for Godot Wild Jam #72. It’s a good thing I spent time last night finally figuring out how to make 2D lighting and shadows work…

GWJ72

When I was writing this post, I almost committed to sitting out game jams for a while, in order to focus on a small number of longer-term projects. Honestly, I could use some momentum right now, and I feel the most momentum after finishing a game jam.

So, I’m signed up for Godot Wild Jam 72.

This time around, I’m going to try to make a really simple game, and focus on the visuals and providing a quality, polished experience. In other words, I won’t try to design a whole-ass magic system.

(though thanks to a recent humble bundle, I’m looking forward to diving in to Game Magic: A Designer’s Guide to Magic Systems in Theory and Practice.)