Cupid's Rampage Post-mortem by ArborealOctopus

This is a game of many firsts for us and this post-mortem is just to record these (My First Post-mortem too).  As a team, this project ended sourly for us and this is not meant to blame anyone but to recognise the achievements we made and the lessons we learnt from it.  I don't think this is the best game in the world but I am really proud of this game and I had fun making it.

This is our first functionally complete game.

One of the major benefits of doing a gamejam is the smaller scope we're forced to do. As a team we like lots of features and variety, and we usually try to fit as much of it in our games as possible which leads to the games being too big for just 2 inexperienced people to complete to a statisfactory degree. There were more things we wanted to do for the game but the timeframe just didn't allow it. Because the game has got to the point of being functionally complete, we could now experience new aspects of game development; setting up a store page, advertising our game, feedback etc which will help in future endeavours.

This is my first game I've made without any major errors

My coding has come a long way since I started last year. Previously, I've been reluctant to fix errors as I didn't know how to or didn't see it as much as a priority if the game still ran. I think there was a point during this gamejam where I was trying to test a build out and I had a bunch of errors so it didn't run at all so I had to go through and work through all of them.

This is our first WebGL/Itch.io game

I probably wouldn't have heard of Itch.io without doing this gamejam. It is very easy to set up a store page, update builds and get your game out to people. I do wish WebGL worked on mobiles too.

We completed the game on time

We even had a bit of time left to spare. This is an achievement in itself. We probably needed a bit more time playtesting and making the game a truly enjoyable experience, but for our first shot at a gamejam this is amazing. The game fit the theme of the jam and it was almost exactly the original idea.

Lessons learnt

Clarity of vision

This is a problem which has plagued us for awhile. One of us would have an idea, aspects would get missed/misinterpreted during communication and the other person fills in what they think should go there and we can't decide on it, we've both been the idea guy on different games. I've been reading the Kotaku article on Anthem and it was a similar problem there. The short timeframe of the gamejam made this even worse as we didn't then have the time to come to a conclusion.

Our preventative strategy has been to outline everyhting we can about our ideas even the things we might think would be obvious. But we still missed something and a disagreement arose. A smaller scope leaves less room for error. We should also communicate mismatchs ASAP, as people can very quickly fall in love with an idea, especially if they can see it as a demo.

Marketing

Due to our fallouts and my shyness we did close to zero marketing for this game. We can't assume that people will just go through and visit every game in a gamejam. We should've found our audience, our community, the streamers who stream gamejam games, done the rating swaps of the gamejam, replied to feedback good and bad, etc. We could have then used this vital data to make further adjustments and improvements.

The Future

The team has split but we are both going to continue game development and I wish him the best in his games which I look forward to playing. I will come back and add more updates to this game so stay tuned. I think games with a small scope work well for small teams and I'll be aiming smaller in my next projects as I build up the skills and confidence to tackle bigger projects. I personally won't be doing a gamejam for awhile but I will later as I did find it fun.