Tethget[h]er forever? Postmortem and looking into the future.

(TL:DR version down below)

Now that the Brackey's Gamejam (BJG, for short) is over and all of the votes have been cast, I thought it would be good to do some self-reflection on the project and talk about what I plan to do going in the future.

The Good...

First, how did the game fair? Well, lets look at the scores:

3/5 For a game developed by one person over the course of a week (while also having to work during that work)? Not bad, not bad. And the ranking isn't too bad either, 704 out of nearly 1900 entries puts the projectile pretty well into the top 50% of entries. I do find it neat that the score matches well with the ranking. It helped that most of the feedback that I got from fellow developers who submitted was fairly positive with constructive criticism here and there. But getting good feels and high-fives was a great feeling, it also wasn't exactly my end-goal for the jam. What I set out to achieve was to have a functional slice of a game concept, a little bit more than a minimal-viable-product but not very far from it. I feel like I reached that goal for this game jam, so I'll definitely pat myself on the shoulder for that.

...And the Bad

That said, nothing is ever all gumdrops and roses, and as I eluded to there was fair constructive criticism given as helpful feedback.

• Audio levels were mismatched, with some sounds being louder than others for no reason
• Game mechanics were not explained well outside of the wall-of-text that is the "How To Play" section, needs a tutorial
• Enemies don't have their HP displayed
• The tethers themselves do not effect enemies
• Game balance is skewed towards too easy, main mechanic of tethering objects/towers can be ignored
• Larger enemies don't do more damage or appear to be more dangerous

I agree with nearly all of these points, though in the case of the tethers having effects that was something I had not actually thought of as a mechanic. Admittedly QA and balance adjustments of the game was pretty much left to the last few hours that I had available to me (I had to work during the game jam, which limited available dev time).

Also, and this is quite silly to admit. I had totally messed up and misspelled the name of my game, as one person pointed out during their stream of the game. "Tethgeter" should have really been "Tethgether" since it's a combination of "tether" and "together".

Future Plans

I'll just be blunt here, this project was meant as an opportunity to flex some creative muscles in an environment and set timeframe that was somewhat opportune with how my life is right now. These types of projects are very much my jam right now given that I have to focus a far greater amount of my energy on things that are not exactly game development. And what game development energy I do have should be devoted to projects that are already in the works. Such as 'Space Kid Adventure', 'Olam', and 'Bad Animals'.

That means that I need to put my proverbial developer tools down on this project and leave this alone for awhile. I want to eventually pick this up again, because I really do like the concept and others seem to have enjoyed it as well. I don't like abandoning projects when I know I can do more to it so I'll probably still be poking around with design ideas or doing something in super short bursts at random. But this game won't be getting anywhere near the same amount of development focus that a game jam or a project in active development demands.

One of the more immediate things to be fixed is the game's title, which I'm going to cheekily rename to "Tethget[h]er" in recognition of my silly spelling error.

If you managed to get this far, thank you for reading! (And if you skipped to the TLDR, thank you anyway!) I know it's a long writing that's probably somewhat rambling on. I hope folks will stayed tuned as there will be more updates on this project... sometime.

TL:DR - Game jam was fun, game got good feedback, many things to fix over a long period of time. Project on backburner while other projects take priority.