I just finished Godot Wild Jam #90.
The theme was "Journey." We had a team of five. There was 3D art, 2D art, music, two programmers, and a game designer on paper.
The game is called Tree Lover Journey. A kakapo tribe member gets hurt and only a hermit shaman living deep in the woods can heal him. You gather the tribe, collect resources during the day, survive the nights, and escort the injured parrot to safety.
It sounds good. In my head it sounded great.
Here is what we wrote on the itch.io page:
At this point its unfinished and there is no way to talk out of it. We will consider whether it makes sense to continue. Would you believe there is a company paying us to develop games?
That last line was a joke. Mostly.
What went wrong
The same thing that always goes wrong. No real game design before we started.
We had a concept. We had a vibe. We even had a dedicated game designer on the team. We still did not have a clear answer to the basic question: what does the player actually do, moment to moment, that is fun?
We jumped to implementation. The 3D looked nice. The systems started coming together. But somewhere in the middle we realized we did not have a game. We had a prototype without a heart.
By the time we understood the problem, the jam was almost over.
The thing is, I knew this would happen
This is not my first jam. Every time I go in, I tell myself I will focus on game design first. Keep the scope small. Have a playable core before anything else.
Every time, the same result.
I think part of it is that game design is the hardest part and also the easiest to skip. Writing code feels like progress. Opening a design doc and asking "what is actually fun here?" feels like delay. So you skip it and hope the fun appears later.
It does not appear later.
What I am taking into the next jam
One rule: before any code, I have to be able to describe the core game loop in two sentences. If I cannot do that, we are not ready to build.
Simple rule. Probably will forget it under pressure. But writing it here makes it harder to ignore.
If you have been in the same loop, I would love to hear how you broke out of it. And if you want to see the unfinished parrot game, it is playable in the browser here: jame581.itch.io/tree-lover-journey
Source code is on GitHub too: github.com/hubacekjakub/Godot-TreeLoverJourney