Persist Postmortem

feel like I should release a postmortem for every game jam (woops to the past ones I've missed) so gonna try to do this one off the cuff before getting back to the grind!

things that went well

• even with the myriad ways of bypassing it, I'm proud of the little save system and "one-timey" nice of the experience
• made a complete game in 2 days!
• UI is pretty good imo
  • Panel with a gradient + border around it feels strong, what's the next tier of UI quality though? gentle animation?
• love the way the bg shader is impacted by the gameplay
• nailed the theme
• love the sfx/bgm work I did on this
• published a game in Godot

things to work on

• need to spend more time on the actual gameplay!
  • had the ideas for things to do with the button, spent almost all the time finagling the save system to work as needed
  • get the gameplay in first!
• variety of gameplay
  • tracks with the above, but really need to hammer this home - a button moving around the screen is a single thing and ya gotta have a few...will try for 3 next time (was the initial plan)
• hover sounds can't be more than like... .1s, otherwise they seriously clip with each other and it gets really gnarly
• didn't share with anyone at all until it was posted...
  • I think if I got feedback like "the persist button is the real enemy" earlier on, I would've hard leaned into it
  • feedback and iteration are really the things that make games (art in general?) special and I gotta respect that
• needed some more assets!
  • art, shaders, idk something...feels incomplete compared to some of the stellar work on my co-jammers.
• dude... it's always time management, duh!
  • find that core, cut the rest out!
  • in this case, persist button being the enemy is the core, pour all your time and effort into making that sing and screw the rest even if it means people can replay it or w/e