Post-mortem of "Reaching Delta Station"

Hey guys, it's Tuile Time! Now that the Brackeys 6 has been over for a while, and I've had time to reflect on our entry, Reaching Delta Station. Honestly, some parts are fuzzy due to the severe flu I had for most of the jam, but I'll do my best to discuss the takeaways from it.

Since I'll be writing only one post-mortem this time, I'll stick to the essentials:

• Pre-Jam Prep
• Team Cohesiveness & Workflow
• Game Design & Development
• Art & Music
• Development & Testing
• Voting Period & Amazing Feedback
• Future of the Game

Pre-Jam Prep

If anything, I'd say that the pre-jam prep time went amazingly. Our team was formed about a week before the jam started, and we went over availabilities, preferences, and preventive measures in advance. I took inspiration from "Switch" by Chip & Dan Heath in order to formulate plans, and I do think that gave us a boost during for the first few days of the jam.

Due to reading the book, I tried anticipating as many things as I could that would normally eat up time during the jam, that wasn't related to the development of the game at all.

Some things that I did that I felt would be life-savers for a normal jam:

• Created a workflow in Notion that would be great for fast-paced projects.
• Discussed and tested this workflow with team in advance to see if it's a good fit.
• Meal-prepping, so that I ate well throughout the first half of the week.
• Cleaning the house, so I don't work have to do many chores during jam-time.
• Assembled testers in one space, and gathered potential questions to ask them.
• Wrote up a small marketing plan, along with outreach content, so that I wouldn't have to think about it during/after the jam. (This went largely un-used due to overall derailment, but it's great that I have this to work with, for the future)
• Created a unique changelog system that links directly to our task database.
• Consolidated the literal meanings of all the themes on the voting list, so as to understand them better before voting in as a team.

Team Cohesiveness & Workflow

I'd say that for a group of 3 that just met each other, we did quite well. We were able to work around each other's strengths and weaknesses, and put up a strong front.

In terms of the workflow itself, I felt that we had some trouble keeping all documentation visible as time dragged on. For example, we had to go into 2-3 layers of toggles to get to the tutorial content (which I later just dragged out to the main page for accessibility). I don't want to click through a bunch of things to get to one thing, so I'll see what I can do for next time.

Game Design & Development

I feel like the game design phase was probably what ran smoothest for me this time. While we did have some rudimentary ideas, we decided to brainstorm and choose one that we felt aligned with the theme the most. After that, the workflow did worked as a template for me to flesh out most of the game. We went over what I came up with, and finalized a core loop, with everything else in the "Nice to Have" section. Every idea that didn't seem feasible, got thrown in there.

Unfortunately, we didn't foresee something crucial: the game was still too complex for a 3 people team to build. Despite the confidence of the developer of our team that we could make the game without issues, I think there is something fundamental that we missed early on:

If a game absolutely needs a tutorial to make it playable and immersive, it's probably not a good game jam idea. Its complexity makes it easy to mess up execution, especially if attempted by beginners.

This is exactly what happened for us. We had a good run, but we couldn't implement the tutorial, and we slipped into damage control mode during the last few days. We didn't realize early enough that the tutorial wouldn't happen, and failed to mitigate losses early enough. Too much development time went into make things pretty, and importing assets. Having only one developer doing everything in-engine was a big ask as well. I will be considering these lessons learnt for next time.

Art & Music

I messed up by switching to a higher resolution for the art, compared to what I was used to, and had animation bases ready for. Going from 32 x 32 to 32 x 64 was a great learning curve personally, but it compromised the quality of the art to some extent. I had to do everything from scratch, and this wasn't fun at all while being completely sick. I was slower, dumber, and my lack of fundamentals when it came to shading was direly obvious. Thankfully, my jam-mates were patient, full of feedback and ideas, and it helped smooth things over with time.

Somehow, I finished all the art the day before the jam ended. Although not all of the art made it into the game, and we were unable to generate colors on the passengers (they were in grayscale for the final build), it was all there. The cover art could have been much better, but I was so burnt and sick at that point that I couldn't really keep going. Not being able to finish the core loop built up some disappointment, and I decided to leave the game page unembellished.

The music was pretty much fantastic from the beginning. Very few adjustments needed to be made, and it's sad that we couldn't maximize on it. The "moaning men" sfx was an unintentional faux-pas, but overall, the composer iterated and completed all the music comfortably within the time he said he would.

Iterations & Testing

The idea was to do test builds every day, and as the game designer, I would give feedback on balancing and bugs until the core loop was done. After that, we would start testing with our testers for fun and add some nice-to-haves. I absolutely wanted to balance the game for fun, but unfortunately, we couldn't finish the core loop.

We tested 4 builds in total, and had a nice back and forth in terms of feedback for a while. I skipped on creating a thread for the last build since the developer seemed to respond better to voice/discussion-based feedback overall, but it was interesting to see it evolve within the iterations that I got to see. The lack of testing is something I do regret, but given the circumstances, we did what we could.

Voting Period & Amazing Feedback

I got to meet some amazing people as they rated the game and left feedback. Some people left elaborate encouragement and comments, and it was interesting to read the constructive criticism that I received in DMs as well.

I didn't struggle with getting to the required 20 ratings much, and was able to focus on just exchanging interesting pointers on game design & development with others. I could see that other participants felt similarly about the faults of our game. Coupled with the rank and rating distribution that you can see below, it was good reinforcement that if we hadn't gotten derailed in our execution, we would have created a game with great potential.

Future of the Game

Since we ended up with an extremely buggy release, we will be attempting to give "Reaching Delta Station" a do-over. If the core-loop, as we had originally intended, becomes a game that we want to polish further, it may see further game development as well. Despite all our troubles, we had our individual learning curves, and are better off for it. Hopefully, you hear more from us again soon enough!