Postmortem 1 - Intro/Development Pacing

Hey! It's been a while!

Life happens, it's hard to keep doing my blog posts when I'm so wrapped up in Axial and personal stuff and trying to live a healthy and balanced existence. These can take a while to type up and when I'm really excited to work on a project, the time spent here typing feels better spent on the project itself.

But I digress! Human requested that we try to write postmortems for our Harold Jam entries, and it's pretty clear why, haha! There's so much to learn from these little projects, and it's just fun hearing people talk about their processes. Of course, as the resident blog guy (although that title has been waning since it's been nearly two months since my last blog), I gotta appease my homie!

So, with jams, I tend to have this terrible habit of turning in my homework way too fast. Last year with Re:Punch, I had finished the game in roughly five days, and ultimately turned it in two weeks before the jam period began. I'm just... kinda fast. But here are a few reasons why this keeps happening to me:

1. Underscoping. Deadlines are a little scary, and I'm used to working on this massive passion project that keeps needing its ETA to be pushed back a bit. I learned very quickly in my game dev life that I should never tell anyone when a game will be ready until it's already ready. So, when I only have a month to get a game finished, I tend to panic a little and plan around the expectation that I'm gonna be pressed for time. It's pretty ironic, actually. This year, I specifically wanted to make this game in MZ, both as a way of saying thank you to Human for gifting me the software, as well as to shop it out as a potential engine for future ambitious projects, and because of that I anticipated a lot more friction with the engine than I ended up getting.

2. Excitement. What can I say? For 11 months of the year, I spend my days staring at green text boxes. I love Axial more than anything (except my girlfriend if she's reading this), but the same battle system with the same music and the same characters and the same story, it gets old. I'm at the point now where Axial cannot surprise me anymore. Everything was planned well ahead of time, and at this point I'm just cruising, slowly chipping away at the blueprints until finally the game is eventually completed. So, of course, Harold Jam is extremely exciting because it's an opportunity to unwind. I get to challenge myself, I get to try new things, and I get to pour myself into a new project, all in a low stakes environment. When Harold Jam is running, it tends to occupy the vast majority of my brainspace, and I often find myself rushing to get home from work and staying up late not out of pressure to reach the deadline but just out of the mental high of making something different for a change.

3. Distracting myself. I'mma be real, I'm going through some rough emotional turmoil in my life right now. I'm not gonna sweat the details, but needless to say the timing of the jam was perfect, because right now without any immediate action I can take to improve things, I just need to wait some things out, and the jam has given me a really solid distraction. When I get into it, I really get into it, and unfortunately because I've been using it to distract myself, it also means I've been working on it a lot, which means it just gets done faster.

4. Experience. I know my way around RM at this point. With over 15,000 hours logged in RMMV, I would say with confidence that I am much more experienced and efficient with the software than the majority of its users. I not only know my way around its interface, but I'm loaded with solutions to problems I've already faced in the past, and tricks and tips I learned by accident through sheer exposure. I have a pretty substantial advantage just out of not getting hung up over issues that may be brand new to other devs.

5. Scheduling. I got lucky. I get three days off a week and I only work nights. While everyone else is working their 40 hour day jobs, I have nearly double that free time to focus on development. It's only natural I'd be completing my entries faster than everyone else.

6. This is the big one: preparation. I knew exactly what game I was making by the time I went into this, so the second the jam period officially began, while everyone else was getting themselves sorted out, I was basically plugging numbers into the database. There was definitely a lot I needed to figure out during the dev period, but it was granular stuff. Things like what specific stats to give a character or what exact dialogue to put in a scene, which didn't take long to sort out.

Alright, so now that I've explained myself, here's a hot take:

Finishing early is a good thing. It's pretty simple, really. I get an inversely proportionate bonus to my testing time the faster I finish a project. Not only that, but I get more players to try the game before the voting period, which can increase my natural voting numbers as well as prevent "voter fatigue", an all-too-familiar condition of just getting drained from playing dozens of games of varying quality back to back.

I understand the cons, however. A lot of people have told me that it makes the game come off as "rushed", or that this extra time should be spent on polish. Now, if you read all that justification above (good for you!) you'd know my jam entries really aren't rushed at all, just well planned. The second argument on the subject of using my additional time is harder to quell, but there is a pretty good rebuttal to that. When the jam requires a game to be less than an hour long, there is a hard ceiling to how much content you can add. Shorter is better. The formula for a good jam entry is Quality/Length, which is to say that a quality entry will always do better, but eventually the length will lead to fatigue and friction for players. Just as an example, I had actually considered adding NPCs and flavour into the game with the extra free time I was allotted, only to realize that the time players spent clicking on everything would add to their overall play time. I gotta keep it brief. The game was feature complete, telling a compelling narrative with good pacing for its short length, and there was little additional content I could add that wouldn't lead to bloat.

Okay, but what about polish?

That one's simple, really. The time it would take to upgrade all of the graphics would be outside my time budget. There's a pretty substantial gap between a Game Boy Color game and a Game Boy Advance game, and I likely would not make it if I tried to hop that gap and make brand new tiles and characters for the entire thing. The music was already fantastic, the combat was mostly acceptable, but any changes I'd need there would be fixed in testing anyway, and so really there wasn't much more I could do to the game beyond waiting for feedback and iterating on that.

Okay, wow, I didn't realize I had so much to say on that subject.

Not gonna lie, that all just poured out of me because I know I've started to become [in]famous for completing my jam games extremely swiftly, and I felt I needed to address both how I do it, and why I just can't bring myself to use more time than I do. With that said, let's move onto the actual process of development, because there's quite a lot to unpack about the specifics!

So, what were my goals?

Every project ought to start with some goals, whether or not you write them out. RATD operated on a few primary goals, and here's a general hierarchy of them:

-Explore a new battle system that involved fusing words to create new skills

-Tell a story that makes people like Reid

-Write some damn good music

-Create a quality entry in the jam to give Human a positive sendoff as he takes his leave

-Create a quality entry in the jam for the sake of making me feel good about myself

-Learn how to use MZ and consider it as an option for future projects

I think on a general front, I've succeeded at all of my goals, and I'll break down how I went about accomplishing each of them in the following blog posts. I have so much to say that this really needs multiple logs!