First of all: congrats to all who have finished.

The good:

I was pleased with the idea, the visual and the music.

I found the theme a bit hard: the theme was just shouting at me: ‘planets and trade!’ and ‘two world platformer where one  influences the other’. I found these ideas a bit obvious and I thought I would drown in a sea of similar but better excecuted ideas.

After some hard (and pretty long) thinking I decided to join the world of the smallest scale to the world of the biggest scale. I even had a (love) story.

I kept the graphics simple. Animations were bad, but overall it looked OK, especially considering the amount of work done.

ugly but functional

The music was simple, hardly any editing, but did seem to fit the theme pretty well. Also I used Aques Tone for some ambient singing, which I think worked well. Because  Aques Tone is Japanese  you’re limited to Japanese syllables (I used Google translate for the words Earth and Love, but have no idea if it’s right).

Using existing code. I have a habit of writing everything from scratch which takes much too much time. This time I used some frameworks, public code and some code I had made myself a year ago (and had posted online, so I could use it, lucky break!).

Preparation: I did a warm up weekend!

The bad: 

Framework: I used the Starting Framework. I tested it in the warm up weekend but it still threw some unexpected curve balls, which made me doubt if I could finish the game on time. In the end I made it work but at first a bug made it so slow, nobody would be able to finish it, it would have taken hours, now it can be done in minutes.

RSI: it influenced a lot:

• I had to keep graphics simple (which turned out to be a positive) and could not spend the time I would like to spend. Therfore I ended up doing the Jam, because I couldn’t finish in 2 days.
• I kept the music minimal. I did a simple one take chord sequence on guitar and a one take improvisation on guitar. They turned out pretty nice, but I wanted to have a bit more layering.
• I couldn’t play as much games from the compo as I wanted to and couldn’t play them for very long.
• I couldn’t play test my game as much as I wanted to (should have) . Which led to the biggest BAD:

It was not finishable for  the first week. In the last few hours I made a desperate attempt to make the shape recognition work, but because testing takes a lot of time and keyboard use, I had to post the game not knowing for sure if it was finishable. I turned out not te be.
My apologies to people trying to finish my game.

I wanted the story to be about connecting the small and the large world, about making small changes with big consequences, but it meant players would have to zoom in and out a lot.   As a playing experience it was not ideal.

It’s HARD.
I made a hint page at some point, but I haven’t heard of anyone winning the game. And I think people would want the world to know, because it is an achievement. I did it myself so I know it can be done.

The ‘don’t know’:

I made my own system for shape recognition. I looked at some publicly available code, but couldn’t figure out if it was legal to use and maybe I wouldn’t able to figure it out. If that was a good choice? I have no idea!

If you want a zen game to slowly create a winning state: play my game