and still not everything in our trello is marked green!

I have to say that this, by far, has been the most coding I have ever done. What a wacky situation Hurrican Ian pushed me into - this is the largest project I've ever tackled, and the most new knowledge gained.

This isn't much of a post-mortem as it is a mid-mortem:

I've learned a LOT about scope. I tried to help scope our project down when I joined the team, but it still ended up being about an average of 2 or 3 hours for most features - longer when encountering bugs (of which there were many, and a frustrating amount were due to bugs in the Godot engine itself), shorter for easy things.

I learned a lot about the ebb and flow of burnout and its' affects on motivation, and how jumping into something that isn't coding or building scenes in Godot can be the starting point necessary for short-term recovery of motivation; sometimes polishing random assets is the right way to push yourself through the rest of the prototype!

I learned a lot of things about Godot, few of which I can remember off the top of my head. I learned that navigation is hard, especially using deprecated systems because learning the newer one would take too much time away from the real features.

I learned a LOT about teamwork and communicating my needs to my teammate - more-so than college or random team-ups have ever managed to teach me. It let me have the trust that the assets I received would be good, which made coding less stressful.

I learned that Trello automation has monthly quotas (gross), which we reached the limit of late last night (ugh)...

And I learned a hell of a lot about sleep deprivation, between trying to meet the original Jam deadline and trying to work on the project while people are replacing the bricks on my family's house, on the wall right next to my bed and computer desk... Noisy as hell, but I got a recording of the drill sounds and processes it for our game as an SFX, lol.

Long story short, this has been the most grueling and intense yet incredibly fulfilling LD I've participated in.

Would I want to do an Extra entry again? Probably not, at least not one of this scope. Trying hard for two weeks to finish a basic prototype so we could focus on playing&rating other people's games means that, other than the first couple of days where we took a break after the initial crunch weekend, we haven't really gotten around to many other games... and even now, I'm exhausted just looking at the few tabs I had open for the past two weeks.

Would I want to work with @shreemp on a jam entry again? Absolutely!

Now it's time to take the rest of October to recover - after that, maybe we'll continue our game, maybe we'll start something new together, who knows?

For now, I hope everyone else has had a great jamming season - and I look forward to doing it all again come January! Let's all start the New Year off strong together!