Part of what we like doing during these jams is taking the opportunity to try out new things and work on mechanics or tools we have not had a chance to work with before. So for our game we took the opportunity to do the following new things:

Bigger team, more better... right?

We had a bigger team as some new friends decided they wanted to join in their first jam too. This was a lot of fun and resulted in some very recognizable moments for us slightly more experienced members xD

It was also a good lesson in work division and strategizing. The larger the team, the more important (and harder!) it becomes to keep the vision for the game aligned. Telling 5 people you're working on a couch co-op, hectic graveyard management game somewhat akin to Overcooked! where bodies are the recipes to be made, will result in 5 completely different views of what such a game would look like.

Lesson: Take some extra time to align visions

New Technologies and Mechanics

We also wanted to learn some new technologies along the way so we decided to do a few new things: - Build a couch co-op multiplayer game This involves a lot of extra handling as you need to track which player is doing actions rather that THE player doing actions. - Build an inventory management system Grids, item sizes, matrices, rotation, etc. Quite complicated it turns out - Work with a new pixel artist tool to make their art come to life - On top of that we decided to do all this in a new engine: Godot! New scene types, new ways to do UI, new ways to cut off corners that come back to bite us.

Overall it was a great experience and we learned a ton. If we got you excited feel free to check out the results of all those lessons over here