Hello, everyone!

Some weeks already passed and I decided it is time to make a postmortem for my latest game jam game called A Toad’s Trip. This was made for the Brackeys Game Jam 2022.1 and the theme was “It is not real”.

New members

In the latest game jams, we were a bunch of friends that had previous experience working together. This time, for different reasons, we couldn’t count on all of them and we thought it was a good opportunity to work with new people.

From there, we teamed up with Mariel (Pepa), Pedro (Peter), and Gonzalo (Mono) as the new team members. I already knew Pedro and Gonzalo from my work at Etermax and I had a great experience working with them. So because of that, we asked them to join and luckily for us, they agree to participate and even added Mariel to the team.

I think it is always a nice experience to work with new people on game jams and I am considering at some point joining in a new game jam with only unknown people as I did when I made Escape from Ice Mountain and there is where I started working with Chad and from there we made Happy Ghost Studio!

New reference workflow

I think one of the new things we tried in a game jam that really worked was the Miro approach. We started by using Miro for the brainstorming so everyone could put references regarding gameplay, visual style, and game mechanic ideas.

It was really nice to have a lot of screenshots to have an idea of what may the game look like at the end by looking at the references and it was also really useful to have the mechanics flow with their inputs.

Things that could have been done better

I think we had three issues. The main one was from the programming side. Because of different reasons, we weren’t able to fix every bug and the game ended up with loads of them. Mostly the player gets stuck in trees or the objects get stuck in fences. This was a bug that we had found during development and we thought that we had fixed it but apparently there were other ways to reproduce it.

Another issue we had was that depending on the object’s position they may get covered beside a tree. This was a big issue because they are needed for the objectives and it just ruined the experience for some users.

Lastly, I think once again we didn’t fully achieve following the theme for the jam. Anyway, here I like to be flexible and if everyone finds the idea fun I totally love going for it.

Charming world

One thing that I personally love about the game jams we did during 2021, especially the one we did for Paw Pals, was the world that we created for the games. I feel that each one was unique and consistent inside it. I know they are simple and not the main focus of the games but is a thing I always liked.

I feel that in this game this also worked well and I am very happy with the result. I think the dialogues added a lot of charm to the game and the locations with the aesthetic also contributed a lot. I can’t wait to see what other kinds of worlds we can create in future game jams in case we participate in another one.

Wrapping up

I would have loved to have maybe an extra day for only polishing. I feel that we could have improved our two main issues regarding bugs and maybe improve the visual of objects that are hidden behind things. Other than that, I had a lot of fun with the concept and I am happy with the work we made.

Thank you for reading!