Background

To those unfamiliar, a postmortem is a doc about a game written after it's release to analyze it's successes and failures -  to introspect on the knowledge gained from the teacher that is experience.   Normally it is private, but I wanted to share this publicly as I know there are other first or second-time  gamdevs in this jam who could be encouraged to do write a postmortem themselves. 

This was my first game jam, and first publicly released game.  Entering the jam was very much a learning experience for me.   I've had some limited experience with gamedev before, but largely confined to a few half-finished prototypes and college classes.

What went well

• The Plan - I went into the game jam with a strong plan early.  I had a general concept for a game in mind before the jam had started, and Day One I turned that concept into a solid plan for a game that had a pretty achievable scope, and wasn't overly ambitious.  I would say the vast majority of the original plan made it's way into the final game, and what didn't was missed not due to the plan being unachievable in the amount of time for the jam but due to failures that I will list below.
• The Artists - Oskar and Marrazan were amazing at the work they did both in the quality and the speed they delivered it - I was very blessed to have their involvement on this project as it freed me up to focus on the rest of my tasks, and the work they did was several orders of magnitude better than art I could accomplish   I started this project solo with no artists on the team, and I do not believe the game would have been possible without having both of them to help.
•  Meeting The Finish -  Making a game isn't easy work.  It can be tedious and frustrating.   Personally, I've struggled with finding the motivation and discipline to remain focused on one task for weeks at a time in the past, and was able to break that habit with this project.  It's a small win, but a win nonetheless.   
•  Education - As I said in the intro, this is my first game I've released.  I have some experience with the Unity Engine, but this project was - by design - made using tools I am largely unfamiliar with.   Most of my experience with Unity lies in more conventional side of a Game Programmer instead of UI design and development. I chose APP as my Game Jam game because it would force me to learn how to make a UI and broaden my skillset within the engine.  I also taught myself how to make some VFX in Unity's Shadergraph, and while I did not use it to as full of an extent as I would have liked, it was still exciting to learn how to use it more.  The educational goal of this project was very successful, I've learned a lot in the process of 3 weeks.

What went wrong

• Programming Organization -  Programming planning is something I started off with well, having written some class architecture notes early on, and then as the jam progressed further and further I began to ignore it more and more - to the point that a lot of the code ended up as spahgetti and was difficult to debug.
• Game Resolution Handling - This is one area that my plan lacked. I didn't have a great idea for how to handle multi-res, and in turn this meant that I couldn't give clear instructions to the artists about what size the game art should be. A great example of this is with the Character Cards, where I had shrunk Oskar's UI border so small that it did not look as good as it did in it's original resolution.
• Project/Time Mismanagement -  I spent a lot of time early on experimenting with the new tools I had and worrying about more end-of-the-road systems early on than sticking to my plan.  I lost the forest for the trees focusing on small details rather than focusing on the bread and butter of making a playable game - the end results was I did not have a playable game until the final day of the jam. In turn, this meant I was unable to do good testing of a lot of mechanics until towards the end of the jam, and lead heavily to my next failure - Crunch.
• Crunch - I spent an unreasonably high amount of time on the game in a short period of time, to the point of exhaustion, and it shows.  My game has enough bugs in it's launch state that one would almost expect there to be a DLC store hiding ingame somewhere.   My first patch for the game was also part of this, rushing to fix some balance issues (and a glitch) resulted in me breaking the victory/credits screen.  

The Takeaway

APP was a success in it's overall goal as an educational project.  That I learned how to do many things and implement them into a game within 3 weeks, in an engine that did no heavy lifting, is a huge success.   There were a lot of failings along the way, of course, and the gameplay for the player suffered for it - but it has taught me some valuable lessons to be sure to use on my next projects.   The big takeaway I learned is that I need to periodically take a step back and look at my work, and re evaluate it on whether it fits the planned goal and, if not, what do I need to do to reorient back onto that goal or if the goal itself needs to be changed.

Now that the jam is over, I'm cooling down my pace to get a break from the crunch, but I am still working on the next patch that will fix a lot of the core issues such as the tooltips 'sticking' inside of buttons, pacing being too fast, and other commonly mentioned pinchpoints about the game.

Thanks for reading this,
Crypto