"Planetary grapple" is by now my 5th game, including game jam games and not including prototypes. 

(note: its been 2 years since i made this postmortem. I i re-read it, and it has some weird grammar. So keep that in mind)

Introduction

I have been participating in game jams for about half a year by now and my last one was the Game Dev Leauge haloween jam last year. When i participate in game jams i always want to  try out new things, instead of trying to stick to something that has already been proven. At the same time i absolutely suck at planning which on the other hand has been proven. Therefore most of my jam games lack those crucial last hours of polish that always makes that much of a differance. 

After not working on a game for a couple of months outside of a couple small projects i wanted to get back into it again. Then at one of  YourBrother i was reminded of the BTP2 jam which i was completely oblivious to. At that point i knew i would join the jam. 

Process

As the time of the jam dawned and the theme was revealed, I enjoyed playing games with my firend and barinstorming ideas. One that immediately stuck was the idea of a word made of tiny worlds of which you had to move the worlds around to solve puzzles and expand the planet. I thought it would be controlled by a spacehip moving these planets along to the right place. But rather than making a simple puzzle game i dreamt up how realistic i wanted the physics and how i really wanted to make it feel like space. 

Therefore i decided to make a game where you move around tiny planets to create a bigger world. I started with the physics. At first i used the built in functions for speed and direction in GMS2 to make the ship turn towards the mouse. But that often lead to weird unatural turns. Instead i decided to simulate real physics. 

One of the first things i did was to make a script of which i could give a direction and then return the appropreate horizontal and vertical speed to move with a speed of 1px/frame in the direction towards the mouse. 

This is the script: speed_x, which when given a direction between 0 and 360 returns the appropreate horizontal speed. 

After this i decided to make the planets and the grappling mechanic. Which was really hard to make work. After a while i got it to work, but it took a lot of time. A lot of failed attempts and overall time. The same was true regarding the collisions which i used over a day to make work, and in the end i decided to just make the objects move away from each other with a certain speed decided by the speed_x and the speed_y functions. To add the speed_y function has the same purpose as speed_x just for the vertical speed instead of the horizontal. 

I also added artifacts to make exploration more intresting and to add some story. I planned to add around 25 of them, but only my 3 placeholders made it into the game. I decided to make them "saveable". Therefore making it a goal to collect them, and to provide a reason to continue playing. Acctually a bug from the bug fixing phase of the creation is still pressent, as the artifact counter is constantly stuck on 2.

As the weekend approached this was about as much as i had done. On thursday no progress was made, as i had to write a rapport for a research project for a certain school subject called ToF (teknologi og forskningslære) norwagian for "technology and research".

On friday my bad planning hit me in the face as i had to handle most of the assets, the menu system and the music. The menu and opening took most of my time, which left less time for assets, music and polish.  My best assets are probalby the player and the parralax backgrounds. The music was made in a mere 15 minutes with Bosca Ceoil, but turned out pretty okay.

This left many features out of the final game. Including tutorials, an ending state, many of the planned artefacts and a lot of nececary polish. The deadline extention was a saving grace for my game, though it still left my game feeling a bit unfinished. After the submission i could finally relax and watch the norwagian qualifications for eurovision; "MGP".

Afterthoughts

There are a lot of things i could have done better. First off all i didn't handle a lot of the aspects of the game before the last day. And that is something i have to remember for future jams.

After releaseing the game, with a bit of help from the host. And as in any jam, most games including mine are overlooked in favor of the more extravegant ones. I thought about heavily pushing my game, like i did in the gmtk jam, but decided against that. To see what would happen if i mostly left it alone. Currently (06.03.19) it has 4 ratings, in contrast to the 24 of the gmtk game and the 32 of the BTP jam 1 game. So this shows the differance this makes. Though this devlog could at the same time be the "marketing" for this game as well. Though i seem to have a slight obsession around ratings after i heard that the rating differentiates based on how many votes you have. Though that is more of a personal problems.

Fin

This was my first devlog and i hope you enjoyed reading it. My game is avaliable here and I hope my grammar didn't annoy anyone as it isn't my primary language. The postmortem was inspired by the youtuber Pixel Prophecy and the game was made for the BTP2 jam. Hope to see you another time. 

-Philip L