Around a day into the Jam I was looking for a team to join as a programmer. I made a post saying so on the Discord server for the Jam, and got reached out to by a few teams. The first team seemed over-ambitious and to match the 'chaos' theme wanted randomly spawning portals to go to boss rooms along with having normal levels, with bullets flying everywhere. I thought it'd be a cool option to try out if I couldn't find a better match. The second team wanted help on level design, and I told them I'd be cool with helping them polish levels to feel good for the Jam, having them being easy to understand without any crowded explanation, and being interesting without being too hard. The team seemed to have issues sharing the project with each-other in the first place, which ended up working out for me as I would have wanted to still help them out, even though I planned on focusing on another project. The third team (the one I chose), just LordVladTheRad, had a simple enough sounding of an idea to get done in time, while sounding like something fun to work on. They already had nice looking title art, a design doc, a portfolio of their work to show, and were familiar with Trello. They seemed awesome to work with. The deal was I do the programming and they do the art, do what we're best at. At one point someone messaged me on discord that we could have had join as a programmer but I liked how our dynamic was working well enough already, but looking back, the most beneficial thing would have been having another programmer on the project, and I really should have had them join.

There was a few times when programming I was repeating sections of code that could be formatted to just changing the few variables instead of having multiple big code blocks. At first I was re-writing these sections and was a lot happier with them, but after doing that for a few sections realized I wouldn't have time to keep doing that, but since I was able to format some of it better it helped quite a bit implementing things around it. What I'm referencing in-particular is the code that lets you equip objects to your claws, because after making the code not repeat for each claw, I had to figure out how I should make objects with different interactions (throw, shoot, slash) all work with the pick up/drop script. I adapted when I noticed I needed to, which was in good time, and think I made good time with this. One of the more main planned features of the game were NPC's and I didn't have enough time to implement them at all, I think if I planned ahead of time with a team to already have a GitHub with a base project, and things that go along with that like a Trello template we could have had enough time. I actually already had a Trello template made for game jams specifically actually, as I plan on hosting an open-source Jam that's a month long pretty soon. I previously tried hosting a week long one, but gave only an hour before it started for it to start, and of course no one joined, but a few people did still see the post and joined the discord server for it which was cool. Doing this game jam with the template helped me realize some more beneficial things to add to the template, and helped me realize some things I meant to implement weren't obvious, and I was able to make them more so. Like dragging finished tasks to the top of the done section. I also noticed someone else during the Jam putting tasks in a done section per day, this wasn't as useful to me as I wasn't getting as much done as their team was, but I figured it would be good to have a done section per week on a longer Jam or lasting project. As I was programming features I also realized it would be important to separate basic parts of the feature and the nice-add-later parts into different tasks, this allowed me to at least each basic object interaction, and loading-zone workable in time.

Things went really well in the project overall, and I'm happy with what we submitted as we still had something to show within so little time. The game was still quite far from being in a completed phase though. I'm gonna continue working on this project until it is at least in a demo phase as it's an enjoyable project, I like my partner for it, and it would be a good one to show on a portfolio especially because I don't do that much 2D work, not that it's all that different I realize.