An afterthought on the Jam

A quick initial postmortem:

The goal? A game about the theme Rewind created in 1 week.

Did I make it? Yes. Within 1 week with a couple of hours to spare.

Am I proud of it? Yes (and no). 
Yes, I made what I had in mind in 1 week. Even with the set backs I made it. In the meantime I even helped others.

No, it could have been better if I had stuck with the initial plan and didn't prototype too many steps separate from each other....perhaps.

The basic steps I took was: Analyze the goal (theme), take what I have already done before and choose NOT to do any of that. Why not? Because when I participate in a game jam, it is a sort of exam. A periodic test. To see if I have learned anything and if I can still learn new things in very short amount of times. I have participated in 2 day jams, but they are less suited for that. After 

I had the general idea....the story about getting from one level (at that time a platformer or topdown) to another, requiring items that you can only know all, when you have arrived at the end...requiring you to rewind the level to some stage and try to find the rest. The story remained, the requirement of items remained (but they were actions in a memory you had (intrinsic rewind). 

The platformer became a topdown, but after initial tests, it looked to distant and I wanted to emerge the player into the story a bit more. At that point from the campfire I temporarily used to get an idea of the 'memory portals', the story of John (the final story) get form. I had the node system working, I had the rewind (in level, eventually not used, only in prototype) system working. Now I went to build the actual scene structure. First I used additive scenes, but that messed up the position calculation for the memories (It can be done and perhaps still is a better way, but still). So I went on to create the level (used a node setup as Rick Anderson once taught me) and started to fill in the graphics (this should have been done at a later stage perhaps, because now I could not easily change the renderpipeline anymore (which caused all the 'standard' materials to be broken.

The node system was the best shot and I threw it out eventually because of time restraint. I think it would have been better to keep it in, and fix it in the last hours. But as I threw it out Wednesday going Thursday, there was little chance to that.

I think the jam taught me that there is a lot to learn and if you have a goal for it, it makes learning it easier. Quickly referencing Brackey's tutorials, sometimes finding out even his aren't advanced enough. Learning blendtrees was one of the great things. But using blending of Cinemachine Virtual cams was a thing that I will use way more often now. 

But after all said and done, the story, making it consistent and emerging was the most difficult. I don't think I fully achieved my goal there, but when playing the game myself, I do feel that some of it comes across. Hope others think so too.