Goop Snake Postmortem!

First! OH MY GOD I GOT FEATURED 😭😭😭 I'm terrified to get this much attention, I'm used to living under a rock! I will try my best to roll with it though. Hi everyone! 👋 !!!

Second! (to catch yalls attention hopefully!): What's Next:

• Weather permitting, a full version of Goop Snake! It was definitely scoped for the jam period, so there's a lot of stuff I had to intentionally cut to make it under the wire. Now though, I have infinite* time to implement new things! So an actual release will eventually come down the line. Maybe. I've never made a "Full" game before so it's going to be an adjustment, but I think goop snake is an excellent candidate for that kind of expansion. Hopefully it works out! But no promises >.>
• I have, however, already continued development. Here's a gif of one of the fun new mechanics you might* look forward to in a full version:
   

(also please ignore The Red.....)

Third. Uhhhhhhh yeah! Goop Snake Postmortem time.

What went well! (a lot apparently! but I guess that makes sense lmao)

• TAKING CARE OF MYSELF. This was probably the most important thing. This is a note to my future self, who's going to probably forget this stuff again and then wonder why things aren't working >.>
  • SLEEPING WELL. I went to bed in reasonable time each night. Exception being the second to last night (I think?) when I had a bit of manic insomnia, and stayed up to keep designing levels until maybe midnight or so? and even that night I slept really well once I did go to bed. I think this was really critical, because the day after staying up even that little bit, I noticeably had a bit of that "bonking" feeling and had some trouble focusing. Any less sleep and I definitely would have crashed and burned before finishing the project.
    • A specific point on how I achieved a better sleep schedule despite Being A Programmer: only programming in public places, like coffeeshops or libraries. Even though I definitely violated this and programmed A TON at home during this specific jam, even just biking/walking to and from the coffeeshops during the day definitely helped my brain detach briefly from the project, and helped keep the project feeling fresh and productive.
  • EATING PROTEIN. I ate at least one Protein Meal per day, either a chicken snack (chicken thighs sauteed in oil with salt and Generous pepper) or an omelette of some description, during the week of the jam, Every Morning. I've never really eaten much protein intentionally before this year, but this change to my diet seems critical to how well I've been doing, both generally and towards game jam performance specifically.
  • EXERCISE/NOT DRIVING. This one has just been a big deal for me personally for a while, but since starting to Avoid Being In Cars At All Costs, my mental health has improved a lot. Because I went out each day of the jam, I passively got exercise without having to think about it At All. I just went to the coffeeshop, right? But instead of sitting more (in a car instead of at the computer), I was biking or walking to get places. Those things feel peaceful, or joyful even! Versus the cramped/headachey/nauseated feeling of being in a car. It's taken a long time to get to the point where I think this little about it, but this is definitely a huge part of how I was able to function so well for the GMTK weekend.
• NOT OVERSCOPING. I avoided overscoping (for once!), and ignored that still-there feeling of "hey but what if you added mechanics that are much more convoluted and involved?" Some bulleted notes about this:
  • NO PUSHBLOCKS. I knew early on in this project that I wanted to include pushblocks, specifically recursive ones (like where you can push 2+ blocks in a row, like in Baba Is You). I also realized though, that that mechanic would take Too Much time to implement and test, and that I wouldn't be able to finish the game if I included it. So I had to quiet those thoughts, and  managed to focus instead on mechanics that I could easily and quickly implement, like buttons and logic gates (which I had JUST implemented for Muris the previous weekend), walls, apples, etc, easy stuff. It was really lucky that the design of this game happened to turn out as well as it did, because it often happens that things Can't be so simple.
  • NO MOVING PARTS. I didn't include any other complicated mechanics either, like enemies or conveyor belts or portals or etc etc (but I was thinking about them! because of course I was 😭). But yeah, ignoring those thoughts helped to free up time for more important things, like polish and playtesting.

• PLAYTESTING. Because the main mechanics of the game came together so quickly, I was able to have a lot of people play the game during the jam. Specifically this was really huge for calibrating the difficulties of things, and the difficulty curve of the game overall. While making the levels, I felt like it was really hard to come up with interesting challenges using the base mechanics I had created, but I was surprised when I showed the levels to people, that they would get stuck! Like in a "I understand the mechanics but can't figure out the puzzle" kind of way, which was Super unexpected. I ended up including a lot of levels in the final game that I absolutely would have kiboshed if not for playtesting, and seeing how much harder things seemed to players than they did to me. I think this makes a lot of sense in retrospect though, because to design the game I had had to think through a lot of the weirder edge cases already, so I had effectively already had all of my a-ha moments, just during development instead of gameplay. I think this effect, of thinking everything is simpler/easier/less confusing than it seems like to you, the developer, kind of shows up everywhere during game design. Recognizing seems really critical to making good stuff. Especially stuff like abstract puzzle games!

• LOW PRESSURE. I didn't realize that GMTK was Upon Me until the morning of, when I saw that the jam was starting in a couple of hours. I wasn't really all that familiar with the jam (this is my first time participating, I've always been more of a Ludum Dare person for whatever reason), so I didn't realize that it was One Of The Big Ones until like the last day of the jam. I had already been thinking about a game like goop snake in my head for a while, based on some conversations with JJ in a discord server, where we were all collectively brainstorming about a snake-metroidvania game (it's still in development, and seems super cool!). They had been talking about their idea for a powerup that would let the snake overlap itself freely (and also one to go backwards, or do something similar to the "spitting out apples" mechanic that goop snake ended up with, etc). They blessed me to "steal their idea", which I SURE did lmao. But yeah so I had had that vision in my head of a snake folding and overlapping itself for a week or two, rotating. So then, when I saw the theme was "loop", everything suddenly clicked. I realized that it would be super trivial to just make the snake move out of the way instead of properly overlapping (it would keep the graphics to lmao), with an implementation that's only a couple lines longer than the default snake mechanics, and that it would form a nice little loop. Perfect for the jam's theme 🤯 I think the combination of that inspiration, and the fact that I kind of didn't even realize I was doing a game jam until I had already implemented the basic mechanic, really helped. In other jams that I've "prepared" for, I end up spending a lot of mental energy being anxious while trying to come up with an idea, but with this idea there was none of that same pressure. I just kind of, made a game! And didn't worry about it. This let me spend pretty much the entire jam period in a flow state, and it definitely shows :)

• CONSISTENCY. I'm unemployed right now (if you couldn't tell 🤧) so recently I've been keeping busy by game jamming. Pretty much constantly, back-to-back-to-back. Doing so has gotten me really good at making games quickly, sanding out the friction points, and taught me what's important and what's not. It's to the point where, sometimes even without a jam to theme from, I'll crank out a little project like Two Twenty Five or Tic Pac Toe in a single day. I guess for this specific jam, I had already worked out all of the failure points in previous jams, so all I really needed to Throw DOWN was the lightning strike of a simple idea. For the biggest jam of the year. Oups 😩

What went wrong?

• Freaking Out A Little during the last day! I eventually did realize, "wait this is The Big Jam isnt it. Oh and my project is going Kind Of Well???" This plus having stayed up a bit too late started to break my focus a little, and I'm really lucky I managed to push through that without collapsing. I think it was around that point that I was shuffling the levels around, working on the hubworld, and adding sound, but I was starting to make a lot of typos, my hands got really cold, and I felt a bit cross-eyed. If not for all the good habits I'd been following leading up to this point, I would have absolutely collapsed under the pressure. I mostly just attribute it to luck that things didn't fall apart, but hopefully in the future I can find ways to curb the anxiety in cases like this. One thing that I think helped was just trying to trick myself into thinking my game was really not that good and wouldn't get any attention really, that the jam really doesn't matter, and that it was just another day, me working on a project like I always am. In the future, I hope I can find ways to leave less up to chance.
• Not giving Nanner (my gf) enough attention during the jam!! I was really manic and focused on the project (as is probably apparent 😓), but she was ALSO in the middle of a cross-state move and needed a lot of emotional support. I went with her for the move (literally programming in the car for two hours, with no AC 🫠 I got really carsick but it helped me feel ok despite Being In A Car). I was at least able help her sleep in the new environment (aside from that one night I stayed up a bit late, she was Very Justifiably Annoyed at that), but I definitely could have done better, and probably without sacrificing any performance in the jam. It's super unintuitive, but increasingly it's apparent that Not Abandoning Other Things during the jam is actually really important, even for the sake of the jam itself! This is something I still have a lot of distance to go with, but I think I know what I'll try, to handle things better in the future. Sorry Nanner <3

Ok imma go back to work byyyyyyeeeeeeee, love you <3