Jam Postmortem and Roadmap

Secret Santa Jam 2024

I've been dealing the burnout for the past couple years. Not specifically gamedev burnout, but dev burnout in general. I spent the better part of three years working for a software firm that absolutely sucked the soul out of me. It made me hate writing code or even looking at a computer when I wasn't working. Now that I'm teaching CS, I'm starting to slowly get some of the spark back that made me enter this field in the first place. I'm saying all of this to build up to the fact that about a month ago, I got hit with the strongest urge to make a game. I signed up for a jam, and when I was getting close to being done with it, I signed up for five others. One of these was the Secret Santa Jam. 

The Secret Santa Jam is without a doubt the coolest and most unique jam I've done before. You get a 'giftee' from the pool of participants and you play Santa by making them a game that aligns with the interests they specify in their 'letter to Santa'. It's cute, fun, and imposes a few unique challenges. The first challenge is coming up with a game idea that works for one specific person. This is much harder than it looks. The second challenge is making this hand-tailored game during the busiest time of the year.

I was able to overcome the first challenge, I think. It's hard to explain how I landed on the idea I did, but I'm going to try. My giftee listed a number of games they liked to play. One of them was the new Gran Turismo. I thought to myself "ooh, a car game would be fun".  In the process of working out the physics for a car in Godot, I realized the thing that most of intuitively know about car games, it's a lot of fun to use the physics simulation to smash the cars up. I leaned into this and decided to do a full-on demolition derby game.

The problem comes in the second challenge. As a college teacher, my busiest time is the crunch we have to do to wrap up a semester. I also play host and chef to all of my family's holiday celebrations. Because of these things, I found myself with very little time to work on the project, but I was determined to finish. I wanted to make sure my giftee had something to play. The problem is, that something is more of a sandbox toy, rather than a game at the moment. You can crash into cars and damage them. You can blow them up and disable them. You can be disabled. There is otherwise no structure or flow. There are no win or lose conditions. You can reset the level with F1 and you can close the game with esc. There is controller support, but I would like to tighten in.

With most jams, I tend to look at the stuff I wasn't able to do and say "Oh well, it happens". This time, I don't really want to do that. To begin with, this game is a gift. I don't want to give a crappy, low effort gift. But I also stand by this idea and I think it could make a cool little game. So I'm going to make a list of the features I wanted to implement in the original. I'm committing to weekly updates of the game until I implement everything listed below.

Features:

-A player vehicle selection menu

-A start menu

-Split-screen local multiplayer

-More and varied enemies

-Three unlockable levels

-Win and lose conditions

-Scoring or ranking system

-SFX for all actions

-Juice

I'm not compiling this list to say this is all I'm willing to do to finish the game. What I'm doing is committing myself to get at least these features implemented before I walk away from the game. I've never done this before (stick with a jam game after the end of the jam) so wish me luck. I hope I have something good to show the people that are interested when all of this is done.