Recently, I participated in the 32Bits Spring Cleaning Jam 2024 to enhance and refine my ongoing game project, PROJECT: AEGIS! It was a fantastic event, and everyone was incredibly helpful and friendly. However, as I immersed myself in the jam, I realized I made some significant mistakes that directly impacted the development cycle. Below are some of the mistakes I made during this jam, along with my plans for improvement.

What I Do Wrong?

During this jam, I made some significant mistakes that derailed some really good work I could have done. They are as follows:

• Changing art direction despite having a working concept/style.
• Meddling with my core game mechanics, even though they were liked by playtesting.
• Forgetting to consult my game design pillars during design decisions.
• Remembering that things need polish, and that takes time!

Mistake #1: Changing Art Direction When The Concept Worked

I love making 3D art and creating fun designs based on the late 90's era! During the previous jam I received feedback on my art style and it received good feedback. Knowing this, I would been fine to spend 1 day to writing up existing assets to polish it off.  Like for my simulation stage I think I would have been fine to leave it as it was, and maybe adjust the lighting parameters then adding some secondary details to the piece like having pillars which would be used later as the "walls" to prevent players falling, and some tertiary details like maybe wires coming from the roof to show this is a broken simulation that is run down. Instead I ended up creating a whole mood board + concept arts in an attempt to redesign the entire thing!
That was personally a very bad move as it ate weeks instead of a day at most. This applies to the enemy design as well. I tried remodel an entire new robot design for my android to be the enemy. However, since people roughly liked the style of everything it would been better to remix the design to maybe have an holographic head on a drone or something vs trying to remake / re-experiment on a new enemy design for approval. While trying to redesign everything I lost around 2 weeks to it, which could have been going into the game itself. As a solo developer I believe changing art direction is an expensive move that should be done towards the early development cycle until you get something that sticks with both you and people playing your game. 

Mistake #2: Meddling With Core Mechanics That Worked

Overall, my game did well during the Improve My Game Jam, and was in part due to the simple and fun player controller which had both a stream fire, and shotgun option mode of fire inspired by Sorath's games and early Swarmlake. However, a bad choice I made was removing the shotgun mechanic midway into development. I was trying to implement a Vampire Survivors playstyle so hard that I ended up messing up one of the most satisfying features. I was thinking since I wanted a VS progression style, then I needed to nerf my main character. I believe this was correct in concept since a great amount of fun from a survivors-like is the feeling of getting strong, but the problem with my execution is I made the character so weak that is just did not feel fun to control her anymore for like half a run. She felt like controlling a rock and the upgrades did not feel like it was helping as her base was low, and one of her main mechanics was removed. Overall, it did not give my that Devil Dagger like feeling anymore, but rather a rail shooter.

A better way I should have achieved the VS effect is by slightly lowering the fire rate of the stream fire and lowering shotgun projectiles below base Devil Daggers roughly to give the minimal feeling without being too weak. Then I should have focus on powerups that benefit character stats run upgrade like Devil Daggers (this occurs every few gems by a hard stat boost to fire_rate + shotgun_daggers_amount), and include some new passives which would not change the way the main character felt like some helpers on the map or adding the chance of a unique projectile spawning during steam fire like Binding Of Isaac's toothshot or psychic shot.  Being doing it this way I could have gotten the base Devil Dagger controller experience, while leaving room for the ability to upgrade.

Mistake #3: Forgetting To Consult My Design Pillars.

While trying to polish and improve my game I used some references from similar games I had loads of fun with such as Slyders, 20 Minutes To Dawn, Devil Daggers, Hyper Demon, and took some stuff I really liked and tried to put these into my game! However, a problem with me doing this is that I should been have checking with my core pillars before even attempting to add new features with the game.  My core pillar for my game is "Adrenaline pumping 90’s Y2K  inspired idea of what a game would be like to a kid around 1999."  When taking inspirations from other games I took certain features and ideas that did not mesh very well with what I was trying to do.  I did a few, but a huge one was the following.

• Inspiration: Slyder's slower upgrade progression which builds gradually to becoming overpowered
  • Issue: My game is supposed to be "adrenaline pumping" because of the "fast paced" gameplay given it's Devil Dagger base. By making my game slower it feel more like a slog than a fun experience (or least that I felt playing my own game lol).

I enjoyed playing Slyders a lot, but when taking inspiration from other games its always best to see if its fit your core game indentity before trying to fit it into your game. By trying to get about the Slyder's upgrade progression speed I had to change the way my character played and by the end of the cycle I realized it was no longer fun to play since I ended up with a not as good version of Slyder's based on Devil Daggers spawning systems.

Mistake #4: Remembering Content Needs Polish, and That Takes Time!

I am a programmer by trade and been programming for a good amount of years. When adding content and behaviors I feel I could add these a good speed. For this month I was able to add 3 new enemy behaviors, 2 boss enemies, and 10 new power ups in 2ish days. However, something I neglected and still learning to improve is polishing and adding only to what I can do. For me personally I feel that creating the art + sound for each item takes me at least 7-10 times it took to code it up. Doing the math roughly without needing to go and adjust I got this:

• Enemies / Bosses: 30 minutes to make each
  • Art / Animations: 5 Hours
  • Audio: 3 Hours
    • Total: 8.5 Hours per polished enemy / boss
• Powerup: 15-30 minutes to make each depending if passive
  • Art / Animation: 2.5 Hours
  • Audio: 2.5 Hour
    • Total: 5.5 Hours per polished powerup
• Total New Content Cost:
  • Enemies: 42.5 Hours
  • Powerups: 55 Hours
  • Total: 97.5 hours

Given how I used up my first two weeks to art direction, and trying to restart my graphics from the last jam this means I would have a bit over 2 weeks needed to add the polish, and if I can reasonably dedicate 6 hours of work (minus breaks) a day, this gets me at 84 hours of potential time to work on my content. By noting properly gauging my speed of content and created an unreasonable amount of work to get done in 2 weeks (this was not even including my Steam Page attempt but that is for another time). Now if I did everything correctly from the start including not reworking systems that were not broken, I would have 174 hours, and with a decent buffer of a couple days encase something went wrong.

Lessons To Take Going Forward

Overall, some important things I learned are the following:

• If you already have confirmation on an art style, starting fresh is not the best idea, as it requires new validation, which takes time that could be spent making the game better.
• Remix and add to the existing designs. At worst, you remove details instead of scrapping the entire asset by creating an entirely new one.
• If a mechanic isn't broken, don't fix it... especially if it's fun.
• Be inspired by other works, but make sure adding new things fits into your core pillars.
• No matter how fast you can add an asset via code, it will take time to polish it off. Time-box things you want to add and give yourself some small buffer time.
  • A small number that worked in the past for me is, for every unit of time coding a feature, multiply the time for art/visuals + sound by 10 times that number.
    • So, 1 hour for creating a new base enemy + 10 hours to polish visuals with sound = Total 11 hours for the asset.

After this jam, I am going to be reworking the things I tweaked to bring it back to the original Project: AEGIS gameplay.

If anyone wants to hear about what not to do when making a Steam Page during a game jam as part of an unofficial jam challenge, let me know.

If my project sounds interesting and you want to see more, please follow my Itch.io account, as I will be writing more here. Also, consider wishlisting the game this article is about if it sounds like something you would like. I will be working more on this and making updates on it frequently!