Post Mortem for Pills

The lesson learned this time is very simple so I'll keep things brief. I had two false starts on this jam, one Friday night when I was thinking this would be a minimalist city builder and again Saturday when I pivoted to a sort of side scrolling adventure game. Both ideas came from my game ideas journal, something I jot notes into whenever an idea strikes me.

Both ideas had a decent amount of thought into them but the scope in my little journal had already gone beyond what I'm capable of finishing in a 48 hour jam. Instead of whittling the idea down to a core mechanic, I opted to start with art. This ended up being a pretty big mistake. I could easily spend months working on art for either of these ideas and I'd be really happy doing it, but when it came time to translate all those ideas into a prototype I quickly realized it was too much.

In the future I need to do two things:

(1) Don't work of an existing idea. Come up with something new when the theme is announced. Give yourself less time to add complexity and details.

(2) You can save more time for art but only after the core loop is prototyped. Eat your vegetables first. 

Hopefully #2 will incentivize me to keep the concept for my next game jam very simple. The more complex the loop, the less time I have for art which is really important to me. All-in-all, I'm glad I didn't throw in the towel on this one, but my submission is far less than what I had hoped for. A hard lesson learned and one I won't repeat in future jams.