postmortem

Might be the last game jam for this year.

This year I started to work on game jam and finished 4 games, this game is probably the best of them. The best part of it is, the game scope is defined in the correct way. 

My plan for this game is, 1 day for prototyping, 2 days for coding other functions, 2 days for art and sound, 2 days for testing and bug fixing.  The idea is, even if I can't finish the following parts, the prototyping itself should be a playable game.

And just as I expected, my full-time work takes more than those days so I actually only spend 2-3 days on this game jam. I successfully finished the prototype on day 1, and spent the other 2 days on other stuff.

The reason I can finish the prototype fast this time, is I abandoned lots of systems that are not critical for a game: level system, dialog, save and load, even main menu. The game starts playing directly, there is no level(the game gets harder when you play but that's it.), no story. The only tutorial in the game is about 4 sentences and some images. 

It might not be a good real game, since I really think the story is important in a game, but for a game jam game, I think it is enough. 

I like the design of this game too, it combines restaurant simulation and cooking. It's a game I would like to try when I see it in Play Store.  I even get some time to add shaking and number adding effect. Though my first plan is to add some coins animation,  this result is better than all of the game jam game I did before.

I hope my next game can be defined and finished in this way.

Something I learned from Godot this time:

1. AudioStreamPlayer2D and AudioStreamPlayer3D are positional audio. If you want something not based on position, use AudioStreamPlayer.

2. event.positioin or get_viewport().get_mouse_position() might not work well when scale the screen, but get_global_mouse_position()  somehow would work. not sure why, need more time to investigate.

3.Also learned path and path follow, very helpful.

Happy new year!