Don't Look!

Well, this marks my second incomplete game jam game posted here (can't say I am establishing a good track record meeting deadlines), and while I might be bothered by this I think my energy is better spent reflecting on the things I think I did and didn't do right. Many lesson were learned during this short experience and I think it's time to reflect on that for a bit. This is a post mortem of sorts, but does not mark the end of my development journey on this game. I fully intend to complete it, turd or not, it shall be in a complete and polished state. But before I reflect, some context on the game jam itself is necessary and how the requirements that were to inspire my design decisions came to me. 

Essentially you receive a letter over discord from a bot that forwards a brief message created by a random user that outlines their interests, hobbies, and other things about themselves. This list is a blueprint of sorts to inspire the game you will be creating and eventually sending them. Here is what I got:

Dear Santa,

🎸 My interests and hobbies outside of games are...

Playing chess , table tennis , badminton and music composition and production .

🎮 My favourite video games and genres are...

sleeping dogs , cyberpunk , ghost runner , far cry 3 . Love gore , a good story and fast paced stuff.

👩‍💻 Platform limitations and accessibility concerns for me are...

I have a windows and android . Either is fine with me !

Here's what I fixated on:

Chess, A good story

When I went into this game jam I was interested in integrating a chess engine into Godot using GDExtension, so when I saw "chess" and "A good story" I thought this was a perfect matchup. And I think this may have been one of my first mistakes, in that, I steered the design of this game too much into a game I wanted instead of a game that was intended for my giftee here. I made some holiday themed chess adventure game, which sounded great to me but didn't best reflect the type of game my giftee wanted (I can't imagine they're enthusiastic with what they got). I neutered myself creatively, in a way, by blocking out the other important things mentioned in this letter. Some sort of FPS game was the clear direction here and I think that is the direction I will be taking this project moving forward.

So I went ahead with creating a Christmas themed pixel art adventure game that involved chess. Here is essentially what I wanted to create:

The player is a character that goes around a town during Christmas and challenges other residents to a game of chess (played against stockfish) and solves chess puzzles. 

After the player beats all users they win the game. 

Looking back at this I can't imagine my giftee being enthusiastic to play something like this given everything else they mentioned in their letter.

On the technical side there were three immediate hurdles that stood before me that I knew would take time and effort to overcome: I've never written any C++ (I have used C for small terminal projects), I've never used GDExtension (I wanted to use Godot as I am most familiar with it), and I've never used a Chess library. I think game jams provide a great opportunity to learn new things, however, this may have been a bigger task then I had expected if I had intended to complete this game on time. I think something with a smaller scope would have been much better then what I was aiming at given the path I chose to go down. At the end of the day I fixated on implementing chess as its played in the traditional sense instead of using it to inform design decisions to create a unique experience. 

I still intend to create a game that I believe would meet the requirements outlined in this letter, and I believe that game will look quite different then what I have presented my giftee today.