Gain Jam Post-mortem
Alrighty, the game is out and I've had time to process feedback and discuss with the team, so let's do a post-mortem.
Bugs
There were a couple bugs that none of the dev team found, but there were a few notable ones that I didn't think people would trigger enough to be worth the time fixing for the jam. Clearly I was wrong! (damn you order bell) There's definitely a lot of stuff that got kludged in that made easily-avoidable problems. I gotta set up more generic elements with better parameters to tweak for game jams to avoid that next time.
Balance
I promised myself I wouldn't fall prey to overestimating the skill of first time players, but uh... woops. Tested the game too many times and got too quick before deciding on the par times. Definitely gotta leave the last day or so before submitting to let more fresh eyes play and change stuff like that based on feedback. The main complaint I heard was the par times being far too short, if people even realized there was a time factor at all. Speaking of which...
Intuitive design
Turns one easily miss-able line of dialogue saying the player was on a time crunch is NOT a good enough indication that time is in fact a factor in the scores. Ingredients disappearing when going between screens also seemed to be an issue (an early design decision that was carried through too far). Probably also could have been spotted with more testers.
Moving forward
Besides bug fixes, there are a few things I want to do to balance the game and flesh it out a bit. Here's a short list of expected changes.
- More lenient timer for orders
- Either bun spawners or plate moved to prevent bun blockage
- Timer in the kitchen to show how much it's affecting your grade
- Save system
- Gallery
- Toning down ingredient spinning, especially during the zero-grav day
- Meteor warning system
- Day selector
There's also definitely the possibility for straight up more content, such as more days with different effects and more customers. I definitely think this game has a lot of potential, I'm pretty excited to keep developing it after the Gain Jam is finished judging!
Get Squelchies
Squelchies
Grill burgers in spaaaaace!
| Status | Released |
| Author | Chubberdy |
| Tags | Adult, Cooking, weight-gain |
Comments
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happy to hear youre gonna add fixes! i really liked the game in concept but it was wayyy too hard. it was also super saddening when the game gave me an F even though i made the burger exactly as requested. cool game tho! love your stuff!
Honestly, to me, this is why the Gain Jam is kind of... too demanding? You shouldn't feel as if you have to put something down, even if it is rife with bugs and requires many updates to fix the issues. I'd rather somebody create something on their own time than feel as if they need to put something out because of an event coming up.
If you were getting paid for this, it would be a different story, but still.
If I didn't want to put something down I just wouldn't have participated at all. Honestly the fact that it's a relatively short two week commitment (with the amount of expected content proportional to those two weeks) is pretty freeing. I get to work on a short little game and if it ends up being something I don't want to continue working on, then it's done! I get to move on to other stuff without having another unfinished project. Also trust me, every project I've worked on has been "rife with bugs" that I never would have found before public release. That's just how it goes when you don't have a dedicated QA team. Mostly I think it's silly to blame the jam for the game's shortcomings when the game wouldn't have existed at all without it. Much easier to get a team to agree to work for a two week period as well!
True, but my point still stands on that nobody should feel pressured to put something out within that short time span. I just didn't know if you in particular felt as if you had to put something down because people expect you to.
Honestly the fact that you were able to pull all this together in let's be honest less than two weeks is nothing sort of impressive. It's a whole complete and realised idea and that's wild. As someone who plays the majority of the jam games and has tried their hand realising the absurd difficulty of making a game especially in a short time crunch this is definitely in the top contenders in my books.
I know all the games issues are essentially non issues as they can be fixed in time now that the jam is over and bring the game to it's idealized state. You and another 2-3 people are always the most anticipated contenders.
Super happy to hear. Papa Louie was my favorite flash game series growing up so I took to this game like a fish to water. Extremely pleased to see this game get some more love. I can guarentee it will get love from me back.