Part 3/4: How it ended

This is part 3 in series of 4. Part 1 is "how it started", part 2 is "how it went", part 3 is "how it ended" and part 4 is "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly".

This part is a lot shorter as I have run out of steam or ideas are not coming up so much now. And there's already some time passed after the jam now. Gamejam was very good. Lot's of people have already played our game and we have played theirs and some others we have found. I've given usually some feedback also back, which I think is a nice thing to do.

How we put it together?

Béphane created most if not all the assets, we did have placeholder at start, but they were replaced with final art as time passed. sso made the minigames (very well!) and mainmenu and I created story dialogs, dialog system, made levels using Béphanes assets and put it all together with sso.

How we finished it in time?

I think we finished just in time. last minor bug was found, but other than that I think we kept the scope to just right. I told the guys that last day is not much new features, but we did end up adding last features within the last hours of the jam. I did many test runs of the game to check everything was still working. After some git pulls, I might have got some errors, but they usually were easy to fix. I created builds for mac, linux, windows and for web. I simplified it so I could zip them with similar names and just put then directly to Itch.io. We had the project in Itch.io beforehand so we could test it also there. Béphane was using mac and he couldn't get the game working on web, so he did download and test the mac version.

Last minute fixes!

At last minutes when the gamejam ended and submission hour was about to start we noticed a bug in the mainmenu, that the minigame didn't work. You couldn't play the Undertale-style minigame "barman". The button did nothing. We got few merge conflicts or something and this was broken because we both sso and me implemented it. This was my fault as I didn't check the merge very well. Also I haven't used Github-desktop app in collaboration with others before so it was new to me in that way also. I use git on command line for work usually and check changes in vscode. I didn't use neither for this gamejam.

Aftermath

Some streamers that I managed to get to play our game:

RookRules at Twitch played our game: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1941637017?t=05h29m09s

What I found he struggled with the dialogue little bit here and there, not sure was it because of the pixel-font or was my writing that bad. We did change the font at halfway through the development. He liked the writing, audio and the minigames. So we had all these three areas where each of us were working mostly and they got praised.

Vimlark at Twitch also played our game: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1946052858?t=03h35m47s

He tried using PlayStation controller, which should work just like Xbox controller I mapped it with. Turned out we had a small bug with the mapping: I forgot to test the controller in the final release. I did test it before and fixed this specific issue, but at some point our git merges somehow probably messed it up and we lost the input mapping for controller left-key or I forgot to push the commit. Well, anyway he got it either working or used keyboard at the end. Vimlark did say if it had more things to do it would have been nice. Yes! But we concentrated on these parts we did and didn't have much extra time so that's what we got. I would have liked to redo the scene-changing so that player could have moved the player-character all the time when not in minigame or in dialogue and travel through the rooms as they wanted. This movement was an afterthought so it was little bit miss here and there as scenes changed.

Verdict: People liked it, it got some humor, great soundtrack, fun and challenging minigames and good writing. It wasn't anything new in gamemechanic-way or something great that would blow your mind, but it was fun to play which is already a great success.

I think this is a good point to wrap this one here. We'll see in the last part 4 "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly", how our retro went.