Data Recovery

Oh. Boy. Where do I begin?

I guess this will be a bit of a post mortem.

This is my first completely original game that I have ever "finished". I created it for the Devcember Game Jam 2021. The theme was Recovery. Once I broke out of the cyclical train of thought of substance abuse recovery and balancing games, I came up with the idea of recovering corrupted data. Originally I wanted a game where you play a shop owner that dives into these levels filled with 16 x 16 sprites. There was going to be some upgrades, and ways to improve your recovering skills. In the month long game jam, I am lucky that I got this done. I work full time in retail and it wasn't a good idea to try to squeeze this into the mess that is the holidays. By the end of the month I just wanted to rubber stamp this game and submit it so I can finally say that I have entered and completed a game jam.

There is no music, no sound effects. I didn't really have time to fit those in at the end. This jam taught me A LOT. I learned just how much I have not retained from online courses and videos. I learned that I actually don't like level design. At least not with my own limited assets. I learned a few things outside of programming itself. Like a month long game jams are not for me. I thought with my hectic schedule and balancing work and family time, it would be perfect. Now I realized it's actually easier just to set aside a few days to work on something than it is to sprinkle dev time in throughout the month.

I came into this jam knowing that I needed a TODO list to help me not get overwhelmed and keep me on task. Things like Create Game Over Menu, Create Level Menu. With my ADHD brain, I learned that I have to be way more specific than that. I really need to think about what each of those tasks mean and need. Often I would get distracted and work on another part of the project that didn't matter at the time. Namely updating/creating the tiles that were not working towards my MVP.

On these long projects I really need use a time stamping system. Something to help me keep track of how long I have been working on a project and length of each interval. This would help me stick with the project and not abandon it. 

Something I feel like I did get right in this jam was focusing on the MVP. When I created my TODO list I really drilled down to what my core loop was going to be. Collecting files and moving to the next level. Everything outside of that was to be considered feature creep and be listed as such. Once I finished that loop, I could slowly start introducing things from the feature creep list. The only thing that really made it in was an obstacle that moved back and forth, but I am still happy that I got that part right.