Post Jam Update

The jam is officially over

Each jam bigger than the last, eh? How did we do? Our game scored around the #1000s for artwork and enjoyment. Which doesn't feel like a great result, but considering the huge amount of entries, that's still top 12.5% of games in these 2 categories. Overall, I am proud of what we have achieved: a full fledged roguelike with satisfying powerups at each level. I am happy with how it turned out, although there are some things that could have gone better

What went wrong?

• The difficulty: I kept making small balance tweaks with each playtest towards making the game easier, but it still ended up on the more difficult side, especially for a jam game
• Restarting from scratch: while my vision for a full game would be a roguelike, I'm afraid the difficulty combined with making you start from scratch put a lot of people off. I think a lot of players had the experience of losing on day 3 or 4, and then not continuing afterwards
• Randomness: it doesn't feel great when you don't land that one ingredient you need. The customer summoning was a bit too random as well, varying from not providing enough of a challenge to making you overwhelmed
• Bugs: actually, not that bad. There's some visual things here and there. The biggest bug I can think of is the audio levels that reset every time you open the esc menu for them, which was driving me nuts (I wonder how many people even noticed)

What's next?

I really like the game and think there's potential for a full release, but make no promises in that regard. I do however, bring a small patch to hopefully mitigate some of the issues in the "What went wrong?" section. Biggest change is allowing you to restart the current day, so if you found the game too difficult and didn't feel like starting over from easy peasy day 1, now's your chance to replay :D

Patchnotes

• Added button to restart the current day
• Extra Life powerup works once for each level, instead of getting consumed permanently
• Extra Life being used now has a sound effect
• Reworked customer summoning system (should provide a more consistent challenge)
• Customer plate detection is slightly more generous
• Tweaked layout for a few levels
• Fixed volume levels being reset when reloading options
• Minor other tweaks and fixes
• Tweaked default resolution (as the game may not have fit on smaller resolutions)
• Fullscreen button should properly work (using the unity one rather than the itch one!)

That's a wrap for me. For history, the unaltered jam version is still available separately as windows download. Thank you Mark for another enjoyable jam, see ya next year!