Check it out here: Decrypt
The Beginning:
This jam we were down a member as one of our programmers was on vacation during that weekend. Even so, we were excited to participate and prepared a few ideas when the final possible themes were announced. Honestly I think we did more prep for LD51 than we have for any of our past game jams. We always sort of knew we wanted to do a spelling based game - one of our early ideas was a Scrabble inspired game. Ultimately we decided to slightly shift directions once "Every 10 Seconds" was announced as the theme. As always, I was excited to see which theme would be chosen but having multiple ideas beforehand really makes things much easier. In past jams we've struggled for hours, struggling to come up with a good idea. This time we were ready, and I believe it paid off immensely.
The Middle:
Post-processing effects was something I really wanted to try this game jam. I also bought the recent Unity Tools Humble Bundle which came with a lot of new assets. I didn't get to try out any of these things. If I had more time I would've changed a lot about how Decrypt was made. On the morning of day 2 before my teammates woke up, I went ahead and reorganized and rewrote a lot of the project. I feel like sometimes I make excuses for bad coding and suboptimal practices just because it's a game jam. This really costed us, adding new features became more complicated and I know I'm going to have to rewrite even more code in the future.
If there's one thing to take away from this post, it's this - it's always worth it to stay organized right from the beginning. Invest in doing things correctly the first time so you don't have to waste time and go back to it in the future.
The End:
I'm really proud of Decrypt. It's probably one of my favorite projects I've ever done. The team is also really passionate about this game which is even better. We've gotten a lot of feedback which I'm very grateful for. With all that in mind, we're looking forward to doing a full post-jam release! We have so many plans, so many improvements we want to make. We're taking all the feedback we've gotten to create the best possible game we can.
To everyone who played and rated our game - thank you. The amount of ratings we've gotten is crazy, by far the most we've gotten in a game jam. To everyone else, give it a try! Maybe word games are your kind of thing, maybe they aren't. At the very least come check out the amazing visuals and music.
Congratulations to everyone who participated. I can't wait to try even more of your games, and I'll see you all (probably) at LD52.
