Well this was quite the jam experience. For the first time in the history of my making video games, have I decided to roll out a beta build following a game jam. I have boiled down my thought processes into three main schools of thought:

• The game didn't score well, and therefore is not fun, and needs no more attention
• It was just a jam game, it's complete as is, people will understand that it's incomplete
• The code was so dang sloppy I am too afraid to open up Visual Studio again...

Score Space #7 was different however... In the past I have always approached game development like an engineer would. What features does it need, how much time do we have to implement. Does it work? yes - done : no - fix it. In fact, the game design side of me was (and still is) in its infancy and it was only due to pure ego that I believed I didn't need to care about the design side of things. I was wrong!

What I am learning is that in order to produce a successful game there are several "departments" that need to be filled and engineering is just one of them. Some of the additional departments in no particular order are:

• Game Design
• Marketing
• Art production
• QA/Testing
• Dev Ops

So how did mindfulness of these departments play into the development of Space Junk? Well first off I took a step back and realized that each or at least some majority of these jobs is to be done at least somewhat OK, the game itself needs to be TINY. I mean like a single mechanic or concept that needs to be executed flawlessly.

Prototyping: When the jam was first announced and the theme of Gravity, I began a rapid prototyping phase. In fact, within the repository that currently is Space Dunks lie two other prototypes Space Golf and Hele Drop. Space Golf was about golfing in an anti-gravity environment, and hele drop was about dropping a package supply onto a target while flying over in a helecopter. Space Dunks was built out with a simple ring mesh made with Pro-builder and a charged throw mechanic and it stole the deal. So three hours in and we had the idea. From then on it was all about refining the design and making things more fun for t he player.

QA: I was able to recruit QA and testing from numerous individuals all of whom earned a spot in the credit reel. For some reason every time I handed the game off to someone for testing they found a game-breaking or otherwise significant bug within likle the f irst 10 seconds of playing it. This tended to be somewhat anxiety provoking, however I was usually able to patch the bug in a short enough amount of time. However there was definitely a pattern here. 

In retrospect, I think what happens is: as I develop, I begin to memorize the exact procedures needed to test a desired feature. Some of the time these procedures are written in the game, however sometimes they only existed in my head. Worse, sometimes there were instructions written on screen that would correspond to removed features, or appear at the wrong time. One example was showing "Press space to shoot" at the start of the game, when the player could not shoot, only check up. 

Many subtle issues and bugs were found with the help of testers. This is what enabled me to keep on prototyping / developing out features while ensuring that the game at least somewhat functioned as a game.

Marketing: I think this is the area in which I am probably the weakest, but there were at least some small things that I could do during the jam to have some sort of marketing presence. I feel like some individuals focus too much on this during development and not enough on the actual game play, but I would occasionally upload a gif or screenshot to the jam's discord server. This was a nice way to ensure that people were at least aware of the game. 

I also posted in the discord server asking if anybody wanted to help test, and nobody really said yes. In fact I didn't get any responses from the server, which I guess meant that everybody was too busy working on their own game, or just didn't want to help the competition. It's unfortunate if it's the latter. I mean I would have been happy to help test other folks' games. But it is what it is. I wound up getting most of my testers from friends outside the jam server.

Dev Ops: I did something new for this jam that I've been doing with my most recent side project, Snipes, and that is to use Butler to upload builds to itch.io. Let me say now, butler is the best thing since sliced bread. Especially in a jam when you don't have the time to remove old builds, zip and upload new ones. In fact I wrote a little batch script that uploads windows and mac builds via butler. Once I start that command it's done. Easy clap. Set it and move onto more development.

Game Design: I have been watching a LOT of gdc videos and general videos on game design to try and figure out what it is that I have been missing in many of my past games. One of the biggest resources in learning has been a book called "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman. This book talks about many ideas that apply well to video games. For example, if there is a certain action that the player can do it should be signified in some way. Sometimes knowledge is "in the world" meaning plain to see, while otherwise there is knowledge "in the head" which is learned knowledge that is not super available to new players. Among other things the book really highlights the notion of affordances or actions that the player can do to interact with the product. Focusing on these affordances has helped to refine everything from the basketball mechanics to the UI menus.

Art Production: During a jam, art production is usually a big yikes. I had really big plans for building a custom skybox shader for this jam, but just kept pushing back art stuff in favor of making the game more play-able. In the end I just wound up pulling some free skyboxes from online, and thanks to the last minute idea of my girlfriend, we threw on a little headband / sweatband to the AI and we had a basketball player!

Of course the art production would not be complete without the awesome musical accompaniment by Jordan Kolboba who threw together the main track within the first day of the jam. 

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In the end we had Space Dunks. A neat little arcade shooter (basketball shooting that is) which took place in space and had varied levels of gravity on each of the planets. It had a couple moves and AI with a non-zero IQ which I was proud of. Although the design could still use some work, it was and is functional. The last release to the Beta (build verison 2) has some minor UI fixes, as well as a bug fix to the situation where the ball gets stuck between check-up routines. I increased the aim assist which I think should lower frustration. Hopefully this game marks a new chapter in my game dev career. Thanks to the ease of rolling out new builds, I think it's very likely that I continue supporting and testing this title for time to come.