A Sinking Feeling Development Overview

A Sinking Feeling: A 48-Hour Development Cycle Postmortem

While it is unlikely anyone will ever read the postmortem of a tiny Game Jam game made by yours truly, here it is anyway. In fact, you are reading this so I have already been proven wrong!

Regardless, here some context of our development process:

• After being informed of the Game Jam theme "Out of Control," the 3 of us came up with a bunch of ideas, only to scrap them all and come up with an idea of a submarine where you can barely control the systems.
• Initially we were going to make it so that you could either move, see the environment, or see enemies at any given time. Due to prioritizing features, we ended up keeping movement as always an option, but you can't change the view while moving. 
• We also started off the game with WASD controls, but transitioned to a joystick as it fit the aesthetic and theme better, while also making it more difficult to control without reducing the total number of ways to interact.
• Our team consisted of 3 people, 2 of which were primarily programmers (including myself), and 1 being primarily a sound designer. This led to some complications in terms of the art becoming a huge time sink with quickly diminishing returns. This caused us to prioritize getting a large quantity of pixel art (the type of art we were best at) assets and more of a focus on animating the assets. While the 2 others focused on creating the art and interface code, I focused on the gameplay scripting, and together we managed to cobble together a cohesive and relatively polished experience with no(?) bugs.
• Since our team had never worked together for a game jam before (although we did have prior experience with game design and one of us had participated in game jams before) we made sure to prioritize creating a complete and flawed product, rather than a highly polished half of a game. This led to a lack of sleep as we raced to get a loading scene, a menu scene, win and lose scenes, and a level handler for the 18 permutations of levels we had made (randomly selecting each depth.) You can tell we were rushed by the 46 seconds between when we submitted this and the deadline.
• Potential additions to our game include new enemy behavior (currently they are either patrolling or ricocheting), more art assets and animations, adding power ups and other interactables to the levels, and additional levels of varying complexity
• Potential changes to our game include playing around with the movement (possibly decreasing vertical speed due to the dominant strategy of just rushing downward,) adding diagonal options to the joystick (maybe not since it would make it easier,) tweaking how the enemies react when they come into contact with the player (they sometimes can stick the player between them and their goal, trapping the player in place.)
• If we had to do it again, we probably could have used a dedicated artist as an addition to our team, and practiced implementing different functionality before the jam itself. That being said, I think I speak for everyone when I say that we really enjoyed it and given the circumstances the experience alone was well beyond our expectations.

Overall, we had a great time making the game and hope you have a great time playing around with it!

While it is possible that we might update the game in the future, at the very least that will have to wait until the Game Jam is over, so don't hold your breath!