In February, I entered my first game jam, Godot Wild Jam #90. While I’ve made prototypes in the Godot engine before, I wanted to get an idea of what it was like to use Godot in a more “real” context. I also wanted to evaluate where my weaknesses are as a solo developer, and that’s hard to do without making an entire game start-to-finish. So, I put together a puzzle roguelike called MapQwest in 9 days for the jam. Here’s a reflection on how it went.

The Jam

Each jam in the GWJ series has a unique main theme and several optional “wildcard” themes for inspiration. For this jam, the theme was “Journey”. After mulling over a few ideas, I decided on a Pipe Mania style path building game. To fit the theme, I could style this as placing tiles on a map to represent some grand journey. The core gameplay loop would be rather simple, but I hoped to keep things interesting by turning it into a roguelike deckbuilder. The player would start with a small bag of tiles to place, but could acquire more interesting tiles with unique properties during the run. Overall, I think this was a solid concept for a jam game. Easy to understand, not hard to make, plenty of room to add content as time allows.

In the end, MapQwest ranked 14th out of 129 entries. While I wasn’t too concerned about rankings going into the jam, I’m quite happy with that result. The other folks in the jam seemed quite positive about game. There were a handful of common critiques, but very few were surprising to me. That’s encouraging, because it means my assessment of the game was pretty close to my peers. External feedback is super helpful, but I also want to be able to trust my gut about my own art.

What went well?

• Roguelikes are cool: I was worried the gameplay might be too simple, but it held up well enough. I’m glad I had the idea add the roguelike mechanics–that was a major factor.
• The simple art worked: My visual art skills are…eh. I knew I had to keep the art style simple to accommodate that. So I was surprised to see some folks call the art charming and cute despite its simplicity.
• The difficulty was reasonable: Depending on how I set up the game’s gold economy and obstacle placement, it could easily be dead simple or completely impossible. While there were some mixed feelings on the difficulty due to harsh RNG, the actual balance was good enough to cope with that.

What didn’t go well?

• Sound effects are important: The game has no sound effects. Its only audio is a free chiptune-style track I got from the lovely Not Jam on itch. I got mixed feedback on the music, and audio was MapQwest’s worst category in the jam rankings. I hoped that the music would cover for the lack of SFX, but it simply did not. It would have been much better to scrap the soundtrack entirely and focus on simple, pleasant SFX.
• The controls needed work: MapQwest has two inputs: click, and click-and-drag. The click to rotate tiles really should’ve been bound to right click, not left click. As is, it’s too easy to accidentally get a click when you meant to drag. I knew this going in, but I was already struggling to wrangle the plugin I used for the tile behavior. Rebinding that control would’ve involved tweaking the plugin itself. I spent multiple days of the jam just getting my game set up to work with the plugin, and I didn’t feel like digging in more to figure that out. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good plugin, but it was a little more complicated to use than I’d hoped. Lesson learned: don’t stake your entire game jam on an unfamiliar plugin.
• The RNG was not reasonable: The difficulty of MapQwest’s levels can vary dramatically depending on the random placement of obstacles. It’s even possible to get a map on level 1 that cannot be completed with the starting deck. That’s too punishing, but I didn’t have time to implement a more sophisticated map generation system.

Where do I go from here?

Well, I keep going, of course. I want to start development of proper games, but it’ll be good to keep entering jams along the way.

I had two goals going into GWJ 90: first, to evaluate Godot in a more holistic way. Second, to get an idea of what I should do to make better games.

So, does Godot do what I need it to do? Yeah. I have my foibles with the engine, but it suits my needs and it’s nice to work with.

And what should I work on? Sound is a big one, but I might also want to continue developing my pixel art skills. I certainly won’t be able to commission an artist any time soon, so the more I can do on my own, the better. I’ve proven I can execute the basics, but there’s only room to improve from here.