It's a gamejam postmortem!

It's been a while since I didn't go this hard into a gamejam! And to be fair, the theme "Deeper and Deeper" pretty much begged for a roguelike where you go, well, deeper and deeper, into a dungeon, and that's the route I went towards.

"dyppan" was born putting a bunch of pieces together, some of these pieces I have already worked before, for example, I've done these kind of turn-based combat systems a lot of times for a lot of game prototypes and gamejams, and I added some new pieces, like a level editor so I can have hand-crafted levels, instead of procedurally generated ones, and also slapped some sort of progression on top of it all.

The second idea I had during the brainstorm activity was making a "Linux Terminal Simulator" where you would have to dig through files and try to figure out some sort of mystery, I didn't went with that because I want to do that with more time and though later.

So here are some points I would like to bring up about the last 72 hours of game development.

• The first note I want to take is... don't ever aim to make a roguelike for a game jam, if I ever decide to participate in a game jam again I will come up with a game loop that can be done in, at most, 4 hours, and the rest of the time I will work on balancing systems, making content and polish. dyppan barely has any content or any polish, because the basic gameplay loop is so demanding and has so many moving pieces. But I guess overscopping in a game jam is something that happens pretty much always.
• On a health side, I can get so much focused on a game jam that it creeps towards an unhealthy amount of focus, like I actually had to force myself to take some walks, and not just order takeout to keep working as much as I could. When I first started doing gamejams I always tried to make it chill, even though there are 72 hours, a really good small project can be done in 24 hours (8 hours per day), so it's better to watch scope than overwork yourself on a weekend project that is supposed to be fun.
• I used to be SUPER afraid of doing inventories, and level up UIs and systems, but, having to make one for dyppan, I can actually see those systems for what they actually are, which is mostly tracking integers around, which is a way simpler way to see these problems. Of course, the UI itself is complicated, but that's another problem.
• My final note is that making tools, even for a gamejam, can go a long way, at first I thought I would be wasting time by writing a level editor, but with that I could create 5 levels really quick, and without it, I wouldn't even have 5 levels, I'm sure of that. And I'm working alone, if there was someone working me, they could start putting out levels, content, playtesting and improving the overall game experience, which is pretty bad in its current state, so yeah, hooray tools and level editors!

All in all, I had a really good time working on this piece of game and burning myself through work on the weekend! I will wait a few days and take a better look at it, maybe clean some code, make a remake, just take a look at it and see what it could be.