Swagbot Vs Entropy's post-mortem evaluation

Victory Royale

Swagbot Vs Entropy placed 4th out of 77 entries into the MechJam II. This is just huge and I honestly never expected it to do so well. Especially because I only worked on it for 5 days, when the jam lasted 2 weeks. (I basically just crammed this project in between the release of Hexaspace and the first week of Uni starting up)

But when the incredibly positive feedback started rolling in over the weekend of the rating period, I was just so pleasantly surprised, and I still am really grateful for everyone who commented, rated, or just played. (And if you're reading this, I wanna thank you too, for indulging my brain juices)

What Did I Learn?

Since this is a post-mortem post, I quickly wanna delve into what I learned developing Swagbot Vs Entropy:

•  The simplest of concepts, if executed well enough, will suffice
  • All of the game's systems, ideas, iterations, everything, literally fit on 3 A4 pages of paper (21 × 29.7 cm or 8.3 × 11.7 inches), which is where I always work when brainstorming game ideas. Shoutout to trees for providing paper
    
  • Managing your scope will also make the jam more fun, because you can get an mvp (minimum viable product) going quickly, and spend more time on polishing, rather than stressing out over not getting everything implemented in time
• Manage your expectations
  • This is a gamejam, so my goal was to create a game that is fun enough to last around 3 rounds at best, and from the feedback I gathered, it seems I succeded
• If you animate anything, be aware that all effort scales insanely starkly when you have to animate many sprites
  • It's why I chose this flat-color / marker look. Because I can just create the different animation frames very quickly
  • And it also meshes well with the sketch-vibe of the cardboard cards

A Broken Clock

...is right twice a day. Or a more Gen-Z version: "Don't let one success distract you from all your past mistakes."

I want to use this section to quickly mention that while my skill in game design, programming, and visual design contributed to this result, those things didn't come from nowhere. On my hard drive are 3 or 4 unreleased, unfinished and abandoned game projects with hundreds of hours put into them collectively, and this is by far the game I have received the most postive feedback on. Here's a quick rundown of my other published solo-dev games:

Hexaspace is a buggy tech-demo, Vibin' Lizard Snack Bar was my first game, and my first jam, and it showed drastically (5150th out of 5751), Legally Distinct Block Game In Space! was just a uni project (where I got a 1.0, the best grade, but still, in terms of relevance, it's just as unimportant as the rest). All of these projects are valueable for learning gamedev, but in terms of presentability, SvE blows all of them out of the water, which is fun to think about :3

And I will try to not develop the Big Sad (tm) when the next game I make doesn't receive this well of a reception lmao

Community Wins!

Just a small thing I have to address is that I also scored 4th in the audio category, when I created none of the SFX or music myself (I just put them into the game where I saw fit). So massive shoutout to the Creative Commons community and sites like Bensound and Freesound (which I used in the jam), who provide a massive help and alleviate so much stress for solo devs like me.

What Now?

In the immediate future: Probably nothing. Uni started again, which is draining vast amounts of my energy and time, and I've also been experimenting with animation on the side. Additionally, I have another game in the slow cooker right now, so I am working on that in small incremental packages. No idea if I'll ever release it, but even if not, it's still invaluable exprerience to gather.

But there was a lot of attention on SvE compared to the other things I do, and user NeoAwesomeon even commented that they would like to see the game expanded. And their team created IronDrought, which also just demolished the MechJam II (that game placed 8th!). Additionally, if you check out the submission page, you can find all kinds of really nice comments. So I am very open and motivated to seeing if I can make this into a full-fledged game at some point in the future, and I already have ideas on where to take SvE. But if it ever releases, it won't be this year.