Cowboy Shapeshiftin' Jam Postmortem

I finished the game after around 10 days of work, probably the hardest I've worked on a game before. A few weeks ago I decided to switch game engines after I developed a negative attitude towards Godot (I just had too many small issues and always had this weird feeling that maybe the engine still wasn't finished, and I had to wait until the next update to start my game.) I hadn't used gamemaker in around 5 years, but jumping back in was surprisingly not too hard.

I always had an issue with 2D games. I could never get the art done, and just never really tried. I always felt like I had to learn the engine better, or get better at the art, and then I could start making a game. Thankfully, with this project, I just jumped straight in, and surprisingly I found it fun, and enjoyed doing the art. I think the 2 colour limit helped.

Before this, I was questioning whether I actually enjoyed game development, or whether I just liked programming, but I can say for sure, that I really enjoy it. The programming side when using gamemaker wasn't the most enjoyable, but making the game was still fun. In the past with godot, I would get discouraged because I thought my code wasn't good, but for some reason switching engines and jumping straight into a jam has forced me to ignore that, and I'm glad I did. I'll likely be able to go back to godot and enjoy myself quite a bit, because it does certain things quite a bit nicer than gamemaker (UI, input actions, scripting language).

I learned a lot about polish/juice. I enjoyed making the camera shake effects, sound effects, particles etc. They really make the game feel more alive. I've been playing some Wario Land 4 and Downwell recently, and the coin and gem collecting in those games just feels satisfying, so I knew that was something I wanted in my game. Some bouncy coins that have nice sound effects are just very satisfying to collect. The slow-down effects that happen when you're hit are also quite nice, in my opinion. I'm also really happy with the bomb boss and the explosion effect.

I also enjoyed making the music. I'm not sure if it's good, but I threw both tracks together in less than a couple hours, and I think I did an alright job. I had fun at least. The ambient guitar track is actually where the cowboy theme came from. After playing around with the character with the background music, I just a got wild-west vibe, so I decided that would be the theme.

I think I will enjoy Godot a lot more whenever I go back to it. And I've gained confidence with this jam. I've learned that every engine has its ugly areas, and limitations that you have to make kind of ugly workarounds for. You can't help it, so don't get caught up on it, just enjoy making your game.

One tool that if I hadn't have found, I might not have finished the jam is Tilesetter. I used the free version to help me lay out a tileset for use with autotile, which is something I always struggled to set up, having to manually copy-paste, flip, rotate tiles is horrible, and when you want to make a change, you have to do it all again, tilesetter eliminates that. It helped a lot and I'll be using it anytime I need autotiling.

Overall, I'm proud of the game, even if it's a bit rough around the edges. For 10 days, and not being that experienced with doing pixel art, I think I did okay. The art is simple, but I think it does the job.