secludere postmortem

First, why secludere?

At some point during the development I started to think about the game's name, I wanted something to reflect mystery and started looking into synonyms - So there was seclusion. I realized Google has a functionality that shows the evolution of the word through time, and secludere was the origin of seclusion somewhere. I liked it and picked it.

What went right?

The development went pretty straightforward actually, I wanted to program a platformer and I've chosen this genre for this Game Jam. The focus was Animation and Music, things I've been wanting to practice for a long long time.

As I said on the description, this was the first piece of game I've developed entirely by myself, programming, art and sound. This was my goal for a really long time, the art is simple, the music is a lot simple but it does the trick!

In the game there are animations for the main character and an enemy, but the process for doing them was really great. First I started with a 32x32 character, had really bad results and wasn't able to draw the running animation. It looked like this:

After that I took a break, restarted with a 16x16 canvas and did the main character - At first I tried somehting REALLY minimalistic (a block), I changed my mind and did something more humanoid, in the end I iterated over it and removed the hands of the character (so it looked like a big hood or something) - You can see the progression below:

1 -  2 -  3-

About the music, it was my first time using Bosca Ceoil, previously I used FL Studio and Garage Band - Bosca Ceoil is really great for those 8 or 16 bit kind of sounds, more on a retro side of the sounds, but kind of limited if that's not exactly what you are aiming for.

Overall I think I didn't work more than 10 hours in the game, which is fairly a really small amount of time for a 1 week Game Jam.

What went wrong?

I've just realized that the audio doesn't play on Safari and I have no idea why, as this is a GameJam game I won't research into it right now because there's no urgency.

My planning went a bit wrong, Polish and Level Design went for the last days and I didn't put too much time in this game, so I ended up doing the only two levels in the last hours and they are actually kinda bad. Level Design is a personal weakness of mine (I'm mainly a programmer and enjoy programming simple mobile games and I'm working in a Roguelike, so not very much practice of Level Design - but I want to use more Game Jams to practice it)

Also the musics I composed are REALLY simple and there are like 3 SFX, not a lot of variety on SFX and Music, but I think it's ok.

Things I wanted to have spent more time and, therefore, made better:

• More Tiles to have more diverse images and better level design.
• Level Design.
• Music and Sound.

This Project is Open Source and can be found here: https://github.com/guilhermepo2/becomeBetterJam