Microjam 41 Post Mortem

Figured itd be good to do one of these, because I think I have my head on straight enough that there are coherent things to have gone "right" and "wrong" outside of just "brain no work". Here we go..

What Went Write

1. Planning. Like I did in the jam that produced Trepth, I set out the entire first evening ONLY for brainstorming, planning, art, and project setup. So this time, I spent about 3 or 4 hours just spitballing different stuff on notecards. Even though I didn't really have the idea I went with proper at the end of that, I had a very clear idea of what I found important/not towards executing the themes. It seems like spending a Generous amount of time planning ahead of any actual coding work significantly improves my output.
2. Art Style. I had recently figured out the concept of scaling up a fixed, low-resolution screen, in this case I think the final project was strictly 300x200 pixels. This Dramatically improved how good my Very Basic sprite art looked, and for this specific project it synergized Beautifully with the "world is rotating" idea. I think going forward that scaled-up-pixels style is going to be a fixture for stuff I make like this.
3. Frameworks. I used PixiJS for this, and I think that is largely responsible for its success. For my previous jams, I used Jank Ass tools primarily. For Trepth I was working in Flutter, which is really not well suited to game development I think. For Parrot Story I used VUE.JS for some reason, which resulted in me spending a significant amount of in-jam time just trying to bend a framework that Doesn't Like making games into doing so. While I still am glad to have gotten the experience with those other tools, actual game rendering libraries are a Must lol.

What Went Wrong

1. Self-Maintenance. I definitely didn't take good enough care of myself during the jam. I got behind on cleaning, didn't eat on the second day until like 4pm, and stayed up consistently too late. I'm definitely feeling that now, post-jam, and I definitely need to learn to detach more readily during the jam to take a breath and do maintenance work.
2. Overall though, Not A Lot actually! This jam was surprisingly uneventful, and I managed a lot of the difficulties I had in previous jams way better this time. For example during the last day, T-6 hours, I only had music left to add. I started panicking really badly before leaving the coffeeshop, getting overwhelmed with how much work was left. But I managed to get over it, calm down and lock in and finish the music system JUST BARELY in time.
3. I struggled a little to learn MatterJS, a physics engine that I hadn't used before, and that wasted a little time and definitely caused me some friction over the course of the whole jam, especially trying to achieve rolling without slipping, getting the world's scaling right, and tuning the friction/density/inertia of everything. That said though, the physics engine ended up coming through so this wasn't a big deal!