Death of the Phoenix Postmortem

 On itch.io, I noticed that gamedev.tv was having a game jam where all entrants got a free course. I decided to enter but have noticed a very unfriendly opening advertisement when I go to the gamedev site so am a bit leery.  The game I quickly wrote is on Spelchan.com and is called Death of the Phoenix as the theme of the jam was “Death is only the beginning” so this matched the theme. Here is my postmortem of that effort.

What went wrong

One of the most important aspects of a game jam is that due to the limited amount of time you need to have a realistic plan. The best approach is to start off with a basic game then, once it is working, add features until the time runs out. With a theoretical 10 days, it was easy to have a more ambitious plan. Unfortunately, I am taking care of my father who recently had a stroke and ended up partially paralyzed. With my caregiving responsibilities, the amount of time available to me is limited so a day is only a few hours and ended up being even less. 

My original plan was to have a map that the player would need to explore to find the material for building the nest and the location of the nest. The story would be told as brief cut frames that would happen when certain tiles were traversed, and there would be areas where the player would be able to restore their health that would act as save points if the player died.

When it became clear that the amount of working time was less than anticipated, my plans needed to be changed. I had implemented the combat system so decided to drop the map and simply have a visual novel instead. 

What went right

My original story system would have a class that would use a JSON object to provide the layout information for the scene. I had hopes that there was spare time left I could add animation parameters to the JSON data and have animated cut scenes. The JSON data format is a simplified version of class definitions in JavaScript making it extremely easy to use as objects. Because it is a human editable format, it is easy to create by hand. This makes putting together a script very quick and does not require code be written. I was even able to use the room scripts for the title screen and losing screen making a very quick visual novel language.

I want to expand this into a proper adventure game engine so will be experimenting with using JSON as a script (or collection of scripts) for some of my adventure game ports that I am planning to do. The data-driven approach makes some sense, and when combined with a command pattern may make for a straightforward way of quickly building episodes for a multiple episode adventure game but don’t want to go into details until I have something concrete. 

Mixed blessings

 My original intention was to do all the artwork myself but for prototyping I made the fortuitous decision to use creative common and public domain artwork as my placeholder art. This had the advantage that if I did run out of time, the art already is there, and I simply need to add attribution text to the game page. The downside is that mixing assorted styles of art makes the scenes less seamless. This can be fine in different regions of the game but can still be jarring. This is a worthwhile tradeoff as having a releasable build, even if not as polished as desired, is a good safety net.

Temporary artwork does need to be from a source that you can use, which reduces the source material, but does not need to be public domain or creative commons. Having royalty free assets would also work for temporary artwork. I have bought several bundles of royalty free music and art so simply need to go through the libraries I have and start using them.

Future plans

While I don’t expect to do anything with this game, I will be experimenting with building an adventure game engine using some of the approaches used in this game. I'm not sure how quickly this will be done as my time for work is limited, but an adventure game engine which is general enough for other games would allow for several of my larger projects to be completed quicker, so is a good direction to go.