The actual development process you can find here: https://itch.io/jam/a-game-by-its-cover-2021/topic/1554945/enviro-scape-tentativ...

So this is a project I started about a month or so ago (start of august). In reality it probably took about a week of actual dev time since there were long gaps of zero work, mostly due to obligations and life. I'm not sure how I feel about monthly jams anymore since they eventually regress to week/48 hour jams and feel like the sword of damocles. The difference is that I can think long and hard about what to do with the game in-between work sessions but beyond that in the last 2 days is when I go into actual jam mode. The thing that motivates me towards the end is to not have a cancelled project and also to get rid of this hanging obligation, the "obligation" part of it feels worse when I have a month's time.

About a week before the end I did have a few sessions where I came up with the ability to swing the net in every angle. The mechanic didn't really justify itself as you rarely have to position the net a certain way (I planned for a thick forest of trees where your net would bump into too much foliage if you didn't angle it right, or an insect under a surface you had to swing under). However it did give me a momentum boost, something to be excited for as it wasn't originally planned and gave me a new programming challenge to figure out and get lost in.



Of course the game had to be finished and the bug pathing/behavior I had to just slap together in a few hours (and quite annoying to since pathing in godot is a nightmare). The common "Don't overscope" applies here but I think if I didn't I'd be less excited. Another factor of making things slow is I had to do the 3D modelling/texturing + the programming myself. This game also had an ""artstyle"" that was mimicking the early PS2 look, but it has the issue of looking like a non-artstyle since I just used the default lighting and made the textures as low res/filtered as I could, it needs a lot more effort to make it work. I might just stick with my bread and butter art stylish games because even with low effort a thought out art style can save the look of a game.

So back to the one month thing, I dread 48 hour jam sessions because they feel like not enough time to really think about anything and just push out whatever you initially thought before the jam starts (also I'm getting old). This jam I pivoted from 4 minigames into single bug catching game with a weird angle mechanic, I don't think that would have happened in 48 hours usually. You could say "what about jams with a 48 hour limit but a 1 month deadline", but that's what this jam pretty much was anyway. So idk, I want to rethink jams, maybe I'm too reliant on these self imposed deadlines and should think about my creative goals more. I've made a lot of jam games, (way more than my itch profile alludes to) so I don't know if I'm leveling up anymore by doing them.

Just openly thinking here, so might come off as a pretty dour post mortem. Though the word mortem does have dour feel to it, so maybe it's on brand!