Part 4/4: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

[LATER EDIT: forgot to post this earlier and the draft of this post stayed long time in my box. I was thinking I would write it longer, but never go around to it, life got in a way as it usually does. Anyway here's a little post-mortem about the jam.]

what went good - what went well as a team and with the project and  the gamejam.

- development speed with Godot was good, easy to learn and use. I used godot before and so have sso too. Both of us haven't used it much, but we got the hang of it pretty quick. Some things went to spaghetti code because of it too, but mostly because we needed to get things done rather than get stuck at how to do something most efficiently.

- Béphane was very productive with art and music, that he sometimes asked for more work to do and we were hands full. he made multiple songs, all the backgrounds for the scenes, multiple animations for the characters and other props. We could have probably planned this little more if we had known what we wanted him to do. But he delivered and we were happy.

- sso's minigames came out very finished, which improved playability and gave players some other things to do than just read the dialogues.

what went bad - the other part what was unnecessary or would have needed more work.

- gamepad support was totally unnecessary at this point. I think I spent hour or two adding it. Most time went in the menu navigation, as the input mapping was simple to do. There still exists bug related to this today in the game that only gamepad players would notice. We never got feedback mentioning gamepad support. Extra mappings were OK, but extra input-device was unnecessary.

- scene changing and character movement. Scene switching with dialog system was implemented first and moving the player character was an afterthought that added some more complexity, but not a lot. We could have integrated it better as letting player move more freely between scenes as they wanted. This then again would have needed some refactoring to the dialog system, as the scenes would not store the dialog system at that point, but we would need to keep it as separate and have multiple characters dialogue that was suitable for that moment in time as story continued.

what went ugly - what could have we done different?

- scene management could have been handled better in bigger scheme of things, because we had issues implementing the minigames to the story. I should have just changed scene to that minigame and continue with next level scene or go back to the same scene where we left of with act2 dialog. Otherwise it would have been playing the first dialog again when the same scene loaded.

- sometimes it was hard to get feedback and contact from fellow team members, but then at some times we had so much to do, that sso and me were full of work and Béphane left out of work as he finished everything we gave him to do.

- planning could have been done more at start and between days or hours even. I should have given more information how the scene management works, so sso could have used it on his own from the start. now that scene handling was dependent of me finishing it.

[LATER EDIT: here's a chart about the scores if you're interested:]

Average score is over 3 on most of the areas which is good in my book. There is always room for improvement, but I'm happy.

[LATER EDIT: I did make another game with dialog system, completly again. It worked well enough, but could have improved this one and used it on that and saved some time. Or just use some existing dialog systems out there... As it is a common saying "don't recreate bike again." Use existing tools and plugins available and concentrate on the main part of the game that matters the most.]