The good

I submitted a game

While at the onset, this seemed like a low bar, I found it was incredibly hard to make a game from scratch in 48 hours. It was tough and I definitely had some moments of despair on day two when I was way behind schedule. However, I managed to finished my game and now I feel like a huge weight has been lifted. This feeling is THE highlight of my experience.

My game is fun

I'm obviously biased, but I genuinely feel like I made something interesting enough to warrant a try. There are issues with balancing and oh so many bugs, but at the end of the day I think my submission is play worthy and a project I might develop further.

I effectively cut scope 

Every decision had a lot of weight and needed constant prioritization... and reprioritization. I originally had a goal of completing all the core game systems by the end of the first day. It wasn't until half way through the second day that I got serious about the timeline and starting cutting things left and right. While I started cutting things too late, I'm glad I was able to recognize that this needed to happen if I was going to submit anything by the deadline.

The bad

Too much time building the wrong features 

Originally the game was meant to support multiple floors and randomized loot pickups. Before I got any of that working I built a mini map feature to mark what floor the player was on and whether it was "cleared" to make progress easier to track . When things got down to the wire, there were too many bugs with the room transitions and randomized loot locations that I scratched both features and then had a mini map that was... sort of pointless. I ended up leaving it in the game, but the mini map was not a core feature and I shouldn't have worked on it so early in the jam.

Not enough time for what I love most

This is really about learning when things get fun for me. I love pixel art. I love looking at it and I love making it. I was nervous about spending too much time on my art because I was afraid I wouldn't have time to balance the game and fixe bugs, so I saved my art for last. Then when I had less time that I anticipated, I had to rush through the art when I was most tired, which means I deprioritized the part of game development I enjoy most. While gray boxing as long as possible seems the way to go, I think it was a mistake that I didn't work on my art sooner. The look and feel of the game is also a feature and I would have gladly cut some aspect of the game to have more time back for art and polish.

No play testing / QA

This one stings the most. I have a bug in my original submission that crashes the game and it happens when the most important mechanic, repairing the house, is combined with the flashlight mechanic. One reviewer found it and after 2 minutes of investigating the cause I had the issue fixed. However, since I was past the submission deadline I couldn't update the build and it's definitely an experience ruining bug. I thought I was properly playtesting while I was building the game, but everyone has their own preferred playstyle and mine wasn't triggering this bug. A hard lesson learned here. I can't be my own QA tester.

Thinking too much about the future

I spent a disproportionate amount of time  thinking about how features where going to scale. It wasn't entirely a bad thing to consider, but thinking about scalability in a 48 hour jam is pretty silly. The goal was to figure out the experience of the game, not how all the systems were going to scale.  A few of the scripts I wrote definitely helped me iterate and keep the design of the game's visual elements more consistent, but there were definitely some ideas I tried then cut, which means I was worried about optimizing something that went to the trash.

Conclusion

This was my first ever game jam after avoiding them entirely for over 3 years. The fact that I did this is a victory in and of itself. I was scared to make something bad and put it out into the word, which is no way to learn and grow as a game dev or any kind of creative. I'm glad I was able to do this jam and get over the hump. I look forward to doing more in the future.