Save The Princess post Jam update and mistakes analysis

So, it was our first jam. We did some mistakes. We tried to fix it after jam. Here's a list of them.

If someone is reading this, im so sorry for language mistakes in this text, english is not my native TwT

1. Game design mistakes.

As a game designer, I understood that things often don't work as well as it is in my head. 

Frankly speaking, it was my nearly first level design experience. I prototyped levels at paper. The main point of levels was that you need to do things, that you will never do to win in the classical platformer. Each level was an example of one such mistake: 

1) At the first level you need to fall into the abyss. 

2) At the second level you need to go to certain death in the dark to light up the torches.

3) At the third level you don't need a key

4) At the fourth level you light-up the mistery mechanism, dying in front of it.

5) Finally, at the fifth level you don't need to save the princess .

These ideas, yet something ordinary(I didn't want to do something complex at the first jam), sounded nice. However, when it came to unity build and my friends tested it, I understood that they don't pass levels as it was conceived. Not speaking about level 2, which you can pass by bug using. The ways of puzzle solving was either not obvious or too simple. I tried to fix complexity by adding some clues on levels, but now it became too obvious! For the future I will research about puzzle platformer design to become better at it.

2. Project managment mistakes.

Some of my ideas didn't worked because team didn't have the same vision. I used game design document and technical tasks to show my vision to others, but I guess it wasn't very specifical. We also used discord to discuss project, but due to different work time of each team member we weren't able to synchronize. For the next jam I will try to do more clear tasks and communicate with team more often.

3. Technical mistakes 

There are also some bugs. The major one was the jump bug, sometimes knight didn't jump when jump button was pressed and jump was too high if it was straight up. Luckly, these bug were fixed. I guess, we need to leave more time to bug fixing at the next jams. 

The most frustrating bug was the player window bug. Somehow itch.io didn't see original size of webGL player(in my last game it did). Player window cropped the game. At some levels you weren't able to even see the knight. Of course, it drasticly spoiled the gameplay. Later, we have set the size of player window manualy and we will do it for future.

There are also problem with pixel graphics import. It was our first experience importing it and we didn't set some settings right. Because of it, graphics did not look great. We also fixed it. 

Despite all mistakes, I was excited to work in team and I'm looking foward for the next jams to show better results and have fun. Thanks for reading!

by winded_blues, game designer.