Confused Penguin Postmortem

Been noodling on this for a while after the end of the game jam.

Overview

I initially joined the Leeble Game Jam 6 as a way to learn Godot, as a kick in the butt to work on a game that wasn't related to my day job, and as a chance to work in disciplines that aren't my day job (programming, art, and music).

So in that regard, I succeeded. I worked on the game outside of work, even though work had a major release several days prior. It took me about 2 weeks to go through the Godot 'Dodge em' game tutorial, mostly because it was hard to make time as needed.  The remainder of the two weeks was noodling over how I was going to modify the tutorial in a way that was appropriate for the theme, Confused Animals.

I mostly had an image of a penguin doing that childhood game of spinning your head on a baseball bat and then running down the field, veering wildly in the direction of the spinning. When I drew the penguin in Aseprite, I laughed pretty hard about how ridiculous it looked and went with that. 

The rest of the time was fighting scope creep and just getting the fundamentals of the system in. That in itself took up more time than expected (as usual) since there were a lot of things that I just didn't know about how Godot functioned. Mercifully, there's enough documentation and the mental model of Godot is simple enough that it wasn't too much of a bear to deal with. 

I ended up submitting the game a little after midnight on Oct 31( technically Nov 1). Mostly, I had gotten the code to where I was happy that it functioned without crashing, and was basically at the non-game related portion of the development, the exporting and submitting process, which was more clunky than expected (much thanks to Akira for the grace period). 

Voting went on for the week after and while I didn't expect to win, I felt like the game should have done much better, at least in terms of gameplay. I mean, it's my vocation, so I would hope that it would be at least engaging.

What Went Right

Honestly, the game accomplished everything I wanted to accomplish. I learned Godot, worked on a game that wasn't work, and got to do all the things that I don't normally do. I also got to use Aseprite extensively, got working in Audacity again, and got a subscription to Artlist for audio assets.

So for all intents and purposes, I'm set up to do more game jams with less overhead and start up woes.

My professional pride doesn't want the game jam entry to be what it ended up being. I've been working on it, and updating quite a few things across the board. I didn't post them as updates to the game jam entry because I wanted the entry to stand on its own. But there's a bunch on my local drive.  The fixes are worthwhile because I can take them into my day job, remembering the lessons learned from a shorter, cheaper project.

What Went Wrong

Mostly my expectations and overestimations and underestimations, which honestly, are the downfall of many projects.  Building off the tutorial, I knew it was going to be a mediocre game, but also knowing that it was my first game jam, I was extremely conservative. It's an eternal struggle of not-shipping a great project vs shipping an okay project, and I definitely leaned towards shipping an okay project. In doing so, I didn't dare to innovate, something I've criticized other games for.

There was a lot of not knowing how things worked, and I think I had some anxiety with regards to finding resources. The code is cobbled together in a mishmash of confusing ways because it was based on the example I was able to find at the time on a given webpage. And the anxiety at times was paralyzing.

Another way to think about it is like an artist doing sketches. An artist will make a lot of bad sketches before they create any good ones. This game feels like a sketch to me, one that I'm happy I finished, but not one that I would ever put on a portfolio piece or even want to show anyone. It is important because it's a bookmark showing where I started, but not one that I'm proud of. 

The most crippling thing about my expectations with this project is that it's causing my imposter syndrome to really flare up again. "I've been doing this for 20 years, how can this be so meh?"

Final Thoughts

It is what it is, and I'm going to put in an update or two to bring it to a level that makes me happier to have it on the internet. It's been useful to remind me that games benefit from iteration and examination, and that all 4 pillars of development are necessary to have a good game. Those pillars are gameplay, tech, art, narrative. The game succeeded as an exercise, but was lacking in those categories. 

It's more important to continually try and learn. I have future projects already planned and need to start working on those.