Brockenoid is a game made for LowrezJam 23, which main topic is the constraint, 64x64 pixels maximum to make your game. I joined weeks before and I was super excited for this, because it was really new for me.

Finding an idea took longer than I usually need. The fact that there is 10 themes, and that they even are optional, caused me some troubles. After all I usually loves jams for that one unique theme that you need to deal with. After battling with a few ideas, some of them were discarded for scope issues which is good, I settled on that broken break out game using the theme "Glitch in the matrix" An idea that I almost scrapped 24 hours later because I wasn't sure it would work fine and smooth in 64px. It was ultimately solved by one simple trick, the 2d trail behind the ball, which was giving a much better sense of trajectory and help to ease the crudeness of the movements at such low resolution.

From there things were actually pretty cool, it's probably one of my smoothest jam ever. Of course helped by the fact that I had 2 weeks which was a first too. Making assets was fast, levels too. Funnily enough, people enjoyed the naval battle levels the most, and they were the hardest ones to actually finish. A couple bad choices were still made along the way which resulted in unwelcomed delay, but still, I finished without being so much in a hurry.
So far the game received the most attention that I ever got for a jam game so overally I'm super happy of what I came up with, in terms of scope, learning experience with Godot, and feedback.

WHAT WENT WRONG

• Build was made too late

A classic one. I as usual built my game way too late, and I should have known that, because my previous jam ended in a disaster on this topic resulting in ditching the WebGL build. I was way too confident that I wasn't doing anything exotic here... only to build and realise the game was having massive loading freezes. The whole point of the game is to have a smooth and continued experience and it was entirely broken. To be honest I'm not even sure I could have done anything about that, maybe it's a WebGL limitation. And to this day I didn't try to investigate yet. But still, I need to build sooner

• Some crucial gameplay things were delayed too much

I've got one big problem, sometimes, I'm just delaying things. Finishing the gameplay elements of the naval battle, or adding actual health points and game-over for example on that project. Results were losing some times in trying and failing at over-scoped ideas on the naval battle (= a much more complicated boss fight). And having a lot more trouble adding game-over than I anticipated, taking in bullets you can take. It's always easy to work on a game loop in a jam, that's what you prototype first and have fun with. But more often than not, it's also easy to forget the game-loop include game over, restarts, checkpoints, etc

• Vision

I think the game is too long right now, and unbalanced. Right now I would remove one level from the first world, getting faster to the glitched levels, and also one for the naval battle which is a bit hard and too long. Creating frustration and sometimes a simple quit from the player. And at the end, the shmup section is on the opposite side too short. It's easy to get those insights when the game is over, that you can play it entirely or see people playing. Now the job is to try to think harder about that aspect from early stage to anticipate, but that's also what experience bring

• Music

Regarding music, and assets in general, I'm too stubborn, I don't want to use free assets online. I thought I could add music myself here, which I did, but only too late in the game probably being some lost points in the grading. Next time I should be more open to the idea and just get a nice little track to boost up the presentation. Because now I'm missing the opportunity to have a punchier game

WHAT WENT RIGHT

• Scoping

That's probably the first time I had an initial game loop that fast. After all a breakout game is fairly easy to put together. So that's something that was cool. I like to challenge myself a bit more sometimes but it was fun for once to have a right idea in my head straight away and stick with it

• Godot

It's been a few projects now under my belt with Godot and it feels good. Sure I'm still having interface issues or missing stuff in gdscript but I'm really feeling the progress and I'm starting to be faster and more straight to the point as to how to engineer what I need for the game. Besides, Godot is an absolute dream for pixel art. After years of Unity, then Unreal (but for 3d) this is much more than welcome

• Assets

More of a jam consequence, but having such a small screen and that much time really allowed to take some time to draw ideas, test them, change etc etc. That was really cool. I also include here the extra time I took to work on all the sounds and that was nice. I even had time to slip some Houdini shenanigans to animate "glitchy face" (yeah that's it's internal name)

• Itch

Again, with added time, and good flow making the game I had the luxury to work more on the itch.io page. It's the first time I was able to make an animated covert art, banner, and screenshots and I think it shows. It feels more complete, "pro" in a way, so that's definitely something I need to keep even for shorter jams

CONCLUSION

I'm super happy with the game. As of now it trusted the first line (on a large screen) of the most rated games, this is very rewarding to be able to read that many comments, and know people played the game. So that only is a win. This is also a good step game if I may call it like that. I failed sometimes, entirely, or messed up. You always learn something even in those situations, but I feel that this time nothing went really really wrong. Only stuff where I feel I can be better, or change easily. That won't prevent me from failing next time of course. The biggest takeaway I'm going to take from that game, is that it finally gave me enough confidence in Godot to start working on a bit of a framework. A few addons, custom scripts etc that will help me work faster next time, and have a skeleton of a game right away. All those usual side stuff that comes biting you when you are already late