Digging Up Bones: Post-Jam Reflections from the Pirate Jam

How did we do and how do we feel about it?

Overall our rank was #1545 out of 2400 entries with our best ranking in Artistic Style. We put a lot in and neither of us really think the scores are unjustified. We had fun and are glad we had the opportunity to participate. Now we are recovering. We also spent a few days after the submission cut off fixing some bugs that were found and addressing some feedback. Other than that, the game is very much in the form it was intended to be for the submission. Will we continue to develop Cozy Necromancer? At this time the answer is looking like a no. But it will always be on our dashboard as a memory of the Pirate Jam 15.

Let’s address the elephant in the room—

Or in this case, the shovel. We know it was a major bummer that players couldn’t pick up the shovel head, but time was not on our side. Rather than bury ourselves under the weight of what could’ve been, we’re counting this as a hard-learned lesson: never wait until the last day to publish a build and run through the game. Seems obvious now, but hindsight is 20/20.

So, what went well?

Overall the game design, planning, and execution exceeded our expectations, especially when you consider the amount of mechanics  and systems in the game. We defined task lists, split the work, and knocked them out in short order multiple times. This led to a significant amount of work getting done in a short time with minimal toe-stepping. This is our first attempt at toon shading on Synty's low poly assets and we think it looks pretty dang good. In addition, several elements pushed us to our game feel limits like the diegetic menus, animations, dynamic cursors, audio / audio systems, etc. The last back clap I will say is about the narrative of the game. It was our first attempt at adding dialogue and narrative elements to a game and it certainly adds another layer of juice that we will try to add going forward.

What could we have done better?

There were multiple times during the two weeks that despite separating task lists, creating and loading multiple scenes, and have several smaller prefabs we still ended up having merge conflicts that slowed down development time. A few searches online say we should basically prefab everything in those scenes, even if they are empty stubbed out game objects. This would in theory minimize those conflicts even further. In addition to conflicts, we really struggled to consistently and successfully get a production WebGL build. It would take upwards of 2 hours to do a build and then fail. When we did get a success it just seemed to be a fluke with no rhyme or reason as to why it succeeded.

What will we start and/or continue doing?

Whenever we hit a lull in productivity / energy we got in a Discord call, did a screenshare, and walked through the game and came away with many items to do. We probably should have done that more frequently and earlier and will definitely be something we do more in the future. To add to this, I think we will try and set up some form of Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment ( CI/CD ) in the future so that we know if builds start failing earlier. When we do that screenshare / demo it would be using a build of the game and not in the editor. We will continue to push ourselves when it comes to game feels and juice as it has improved end over end as pointed out in the what went well area. 

Additional game dev skills

The last thought we had was around marketing. While our itch page is/was not the worst, it definitely could have been better. When looking at the various analytics it just didn't seem to be tracking as well as previous games on our dashboards. Be this the marketing assets, the tags of the games, the genre we went with, or something we're not aware of it is definitely something we want to improve upon. While we don't think any of that was measured in the judging of Pirate Jam, it certainly cannot hurt to practice this skill for games we intend to sell in the future. If the click throughs would have been better it would have been more indicative to us that we should pursue making Cozy Necromancer a full game.

Thanks for sticking it out and reading. We’re excited to take these lessons into our next project, and we hope you’ll continue to follow our journey.

Aaron Denney
Jesse Hutchison