Lifespan Retrospective

Todays the end of the game jam. Its has been 5 weeks since I first submitted this game and I would like to write a retrospective about the development process of the game.

- But first final week updates -

This game jam period was really long this time, and since I didn't want to work on one game for 2 months straight as part of a game jam, I only worked for the first 4 (5?) weeks of the game jam. This put me in a weird spot of when to write this final post for this game.

During the last week of the game jam the main thing I did was add the second round (in which you hallucinate). As well as the credits (and speed run timer). For a week after I officially finished this game, I did a tiny bit of bug fixing, like adding a fullscreen button  in case the users screen resolution is weird.

- Main skills learned -

Every time I work on a game jam game I try to do a new thing with my programming. For lifespan that would likely be procedural texture generation for the chip piles, and the card layout that follows a parametric curve. This is no where near as interesting as past game jams, but as I learn more about unity its hard to find things I haven't done yet.

- Art Style -

Every game jam I also try a new technique for creating assets, in the past that has either been vector vs. bitmap art, or the general approach to texture creation. This is the first game in which I did hand drawn bitmap art for the assets (and actually tried to make it look good). I always avoided complicated hand drawn art because for the longest time my drawing skills totally sucked. But finally after 5 years of slowly teaching myself art skills as I needed them, I actually felt confident enough to do proper art.

I was super worried that I would hate the art and get super self conscious about it, but it actually turned out acceptably. After making all the art for the tarot I was feeling much more confident in my abilities.

The other main thing I did for this game was a super restricted color palette.  For the colors I generated 10 different hues, with 2 different saturations using an OKLAB palette generator. There was a lighter color palette which I used for the tarot deck, and a darker palette for the general gameplay. 

- Things I would do with more time -

 One serious thing I was considering was adding multiplayer, It would work decently well for this game, but also would take way to long to set up. I will probably try to make one of my final 2 UMD GDC game jams multiplayer, and make that the main design concept.

One other thing I would add is much better animations, since the ones I have are pretty simple. There are quite a few known bugs with the animation but they are primarily visual so its not too bad.

I had a request to add more game modes, but im not entirely sure what that would look like.

As a complete package I think this is probably one of my better paced games, I don't have too many regrets. 

Thats a good place to end it. Thanks for reading.

-Tadomite