Now that GMTK 2021 has kind of died down. It becomes evident for us to look back and see what we've done wrong. Especially  since this is perhaps my personal worst game so far. To note: This does not reflect the teammates I've worked with, but rather more of a personal judgement and criticism for myself.

The game we made performed average at best, these are the results:

To note, fun was rated at 2.6 which is low in my opinion. Let's break down the major problems during the development process:

Ideation Phase
This game was made in a theme with @@polygitsune (Instagram) and @devkieranmetz_ (Instagram). The theme reveal was around 2am our local time so the fatigue might have gotten to us. Our initial interpretations of the theme was relatively limited and we had went with multiplayer (2 players joint together), rope and chains before landing on this final idea of 'having to balance two mechanics that are closely tight together'. Other significant ideas include controlling a herd of chickens and trying to get it to the other side.

Most of the ideas have very weak correlation to the theme and the remainder of ideas were cut because of my personal preference against making more puzzle games related to the theme which I believe was my first blunder, as we did not have great ideas that we could work on reasonably.  Our first mistake was, in other words, not understanding good execution is more important that good originality.

This ultimately resulted in a flawed game design, a result of poor ideation and rushed time schedule.

Development Phase
Because of our initial unfocused ideas, we ended up spending time development on a prototype that we scrapped later on. Much of day 1 had been wasted as a result and we had limited time remaining to work on our second idea.

This was ultimately a result of the poor ideation phase and we should have settled comfortably on an idea that we like first, before ramping up development.

Ultimately though, the development of the game itself actually flowed extremely well disregarding the quality of the idea. We all were designated our own tasks and was comfortable with working independently (although, we were in the discord voice channel for long periods of time). We decided to give our artist full creative freedom and she performed extremely well in creating a beautiful game.

We developed a reasonable workflow using trello to organise our work and this was the backbone driving much of the independent work possible. There had been stressful moments regarding the code and troubleshooting but there was never any excessive crunch to my personal judgement.

Despite working with limited time after scrapping the first idea, we managed to pump out a second game in essentially a day and a half of jam time left. However, our limited time did not allow room for polish, something we desperately needed to make the game more appealing.

Post Development Phase
During release, the game did not garner as much attention. We had only around 17 ratings from 25 views on day 1. We had not made any attempts on marketing the game on the GMTK discord which I believed hurt the attention our game could have gotten. The highest views we ever obtained on a day were 43 views, and that was a result of the rate-for-rate system we participated in a seperate discord channel.

itch.io was also under heavy load and it was impossible to edit the game page with neat graphics to make it appealing and for the first few hours of the rating phase, we may have screwed up our chances very quickly. Our biggest mistakes were perhaps downplaying the role simple marketing has, even in non commercial settings.

Conclusions
There are a few simple truths that remain in the dust, we all still had fun as a team. It was rather invigorating and the team has expressed enthusiasm to participate in more jams. This was our first time working together (and also a first time working in Unity for one of us) so it was a pleasant experience if anything.

We've done our best given our troubles, but there was definitely things to learn from here. 

• Just make good games, not good ideas.
• Be sure to be confident with the idea to work on
• Trust in your team
• Marketing is important

Well, if you ever want to give our game a try, here is the link: https://steventus.itch.io/the-curse-of-the-everpong

We might work on a post-jam version down the line just to polish and fix the game, but probably no overarching changes in the game design.