Hey everyone. I recently joined the Godot Wild Jam on Itch and thought it would be a good way to start praticing more Godot in my free time. Turns out that I only really had about 12 hours of free time to develop something. That 12 hours didn't result in much. I'm not upset or anything like that, slightly embrassed 😅 but not mad, but I'm just curious if anyone else has been in my clown shoes?

I wanted to make a retro RPG monster battler system where you play the monsters fighting the heroes but turns out that was just far beyond my abilities currently. I did get a basic start menu and class selector going but other than that I don't have much of a game. I do plan on joining the next one but going to try and narrow my focus and scope to a super teeny-tiny project I think I can realistically achieve with my current skill level and amount of time on the weekends.

I'm just curious if anyone else has experienced that over confidence that comes with being excited by joining a jam. I think it's a good feeling to be excited by ideas of course, just a bit deflatting when you realize you can't quite hack together your idea in a weekend.

  • SnapCracklins replied to this.
  • heroic i just finished up a game jam and attempted to make a fighting game that ended up way buggier than I would have liked.
    The point of a game jam is to just jam out and improve your skills. If you learned something, it's a success.

    Honestly I think nearly every game project has a tendency to start with utterly overestimating what you can do. If the project isn't for a game jam you may think of it more as utterly underestimating the amount of time it's going to take, but I think it boils down to essentially the same thing and is one of the reasons a lot of game projects never get finished. Estimating is just difficult, even experienced developers have a hard time with it.

    The one piece of advice I'd offer (other than the obvious scope as small as possible) is that rather than develop from start to finish, develop from most essential to least. For example, if you're making a monster battler maybe start with the battle, and then if you have time add multiple playable classes. It may not be your complete vision, but a battle where you don't get to choose your class is probably more satisfying than selecting a class and then not getting to battle with it.

    Ludum Dare is next weekend btw.

      soundgnome …but a battle where you don't get to choose your class is probably more satisfying than selecting a class and then not getting to battle with it.

      In the general case, it probably is… Not always. For example, among The Sims players, there are those who only make houses and characters in the editor. But they hardly ever play the game itself.

      The only way I would do something like that is with some boilerplate code. I don't know if that's legal or not. I could never get anything playable out in that amount of time. I only have two speeds, slow and stop.

        fire7side

        Slow and stop are my two settings as well. I'm always amazed at how some teams can just make a fully featured prototype in like a weeks team. Even more amazed when solo developers can do something similar.

        soundgnome An excellent set of points. Estimating is super hard, espcially when you don't have a frame of reference of what and/or how something needs to be done.

        heroic i just finished up a game jam and attempted to make a fighting game that ended up way buggier than I would have liked.
        The point of a game jam is to just jam out and improve your skills. If you learned something, it's a success.

        a year later

        I think the Game Jam" discussion is a bit offtopic for this thread and deserve its own, so I moved it here own thread 👍