3 Days to Catch my Breath... Now What?

If you're reading this, thank you for having an interest in Crop Circles! I had a lot of fun coming up with this game idea and its mechanics, even if I'm not satisfied with the current level of finish on the game. But with Hawktober 2023 having a deadline and me not managing my time well, I am glad to have gotten something put together. Now that it's been a few days since I published the jam version I wanted to get a few thoughts out.

How Development Went

The short answer: not well.

I have a bad habit of procrastinating, so I didn't jump to start prototyping and planning out the whole story right at the start of the game jam. I did get a rough version of the crops working right away, but the more I worked on it the more ways I realized I could improve the system so instead of adding more to the game I ended up stuck in a cycle of improving and then re-doing the farming mechanics. I am happy with how it turned out, so it was time well spent, but for a game jam it would have been wiser to stick with my first "good enough" version and then actually finish the cutscenes so that most of my endings weren't just a rushed single message telling instead of showing.

I also dug myself into a hole by choosing to edit the tileset I was using, instead of using the lovely pieces as-is. I do like how the game's look turned out, but I think I could have achieved something similar simply with tints instead of taking a few days to edit and tweak the tiles. I had wanted to draw some faces for characters, but again time got away from me and I had to cut them to make sure I had a mostly functional game to release.

The fact that I got any game out is thanks to my practice with previous games, so I really don't recommend procrastinating if you know your game needs to be finished by a certain date. Major thanks to Hawk for shifting the due date by one day so that I would be able to get Crop Circles up and running.

What Next?

After I submitted the game to Hawktober, I wanted to chuck the game project into the trash and never touch it again. I knew that was just the stress (that I put on myself) of the end of the jam speaking, so I decided to just not think about it for a while. And surprisingly, when I started getting responses about the game they were positive. I really expected people to think the game was bad like I did, but it seems like my issues with it were due to knowing what it could have been and not being able to take a step back to appreciate what I released. While I still think there are a lot of issues with the game I released, I'm starting to see the parts I really loved again and it's making me want to keep improving... Just without a deadline this time.

So while I haven't fully made up my mind, I am currently leaning towards turning this into a full game. It will still be on the short side, but there were a lot of ideas I thought would be interesting but bad time management meant I had to cut them so it would be nice to bring them back to life. The game jam version will always remain, and if I realize that a full game just isn't feasible I may just make a 'finished' version of the jam project so that at least

So yeah, that's about it. I would like to write devlogs as I make progress on the game, but we'll see how that goes. For now, thanks for reading and happy game playing/making!