A quick talk about my first game jam game

Ok, so this was my first gamejam game.  I learned a lot.

I approached the design to be minimal but scalable so that I could make it more complex if I had time. The basic idea was a 2d arena shooter where the enemies merge together into more dangerous enemies. I knew I could do a top down shooter with a basic UI reasonably easily.  My personal goal for the jam was to try and manage my very limited time (~10 hours for the week)  and learn how to implement new things.

Here is a list of the features I planned to implement in order:
- Character with movement controls (completed)
- Basic enemy with spawn engine (completed)
- Shooting (completed)
- Basic enemy merge (completed)
- Walls around the level (completed)
- Collision detection for damage effects (completed)
- Big enemy "ai" and behaviour such as healing (completed)
- Basic UI connected to appropriate variables (completed)
- Sound (completed)
- Graphics (50% completed)
- Screen shake (completed)
- Level difficulty/incrementing  (mostly completed but not working properly)
- Basic scripting engine for cutscenes (completed)
- Tutorial levels (Not started)
- Scripting for cutscenes (hastily done.. maybe 30% completion)
- Title Screen(Not started)
- Bonus health on level change(Not started)
- powerups(not started)
- 3rd enemy (not started)
- high score (not started)
- game balancing (lol)

Here were some of my successes:
SOUND: I'm proud of how the sound turned out.  I was originally going to add music, but I thought that adding multiple sounds for the bad guys had a musical quality by itself. Most sound was made using BoscaCeoil, and the remainder was made with BFXR.  I really liked the spacial 2d audio effects as well, though they could definitely use more tweaking.

COLLISIONS/BODY TYPES/AREA2D: Even though the implementation of collision ended up  fairly straight forward, the mashup of my own knowledge and tutorials/documentation made for a real hodge-podge of collision types and conflicts.  It took me way longer than I would have liked to have a result that did what I wanted it to do.  The good thing is that now I understand Godot a lot more, which I will carry over to the next project. 

PROJECT PLANNING/SCALING: I would say that I released about 85% of what I had hoped would be my minimum standard for release.  Ultimately though, I am pleased that I did release it and that it does basically work. Honestly, if my schedule wasn't so packed I would have easily gone beyond my minimum and maybe 50% of the features I wanted to add to round it out.  

LEARNING: I was apprehensive about entering a game jam, since I have limited programming background and only a little experience with Godot. It turns out it was probably the best way to kickstart my learning. I did a lot of new things with Godot, and made a dialogue engine from scratch (even if it wasn't fully implemented). I learned a ton about Godot and game making in general.

My lessons learned:
DON'T SPEND TOO MUCH TIME ON NON-CORE FEATURES: I spend way too much time on the dialogue UI. It definitely had a purpose in the game, but I could have been less ambitious and had the same effect. 

EXPLAIN HOW YOUR GAME WORKS AND HOW IT MATCHES THE THEME: When I posted the game I was rushing to meet my own personal deadline. It would have taken an extra minute to mention the controls and the theme.  I suppose the theme part isn't usually necessary, but due to my camera implementation a lot of the merging took place off-screen. 

Next Steps:

Overall I'm very pleased with everything.  My game needed a lot more spit+polish, and it probably wasn't the most original in the world BUT I learned how to add a lot of juice and implement my own assets as well as lots of other things.  I'm planning on learning how to implement dialogue boxes, and some interesting UI elements(and some basic ones like health bars too). I really want to figure out how to do card games and  a roulette wheel  mostly because I think it will improve my ability to use UI, data structures, saved data, and some visual effects. I also was planning on learning how to do particle effects for this game but ran out of time. I guess I'll figure that out too. I have a couple tutorials I'm doing involving larger projects as well.The more I learn the more creative I can be.  I figure I will be able to get things done twice as fast the next time I make a jam game.  Time will tell though.  Thanks to anyone who played my game, especially if they provided feedback.