Double Down, First Ever Game Published on Itch.io

So this is my first-ever game published here on itch.io. I admit, it's not much, nor is it well polished, but it is something. I kinda feel proud of finishing somehting. This was made for the Mini Jam Summit 52 game jam, where I only had three days to make a working game using nothing but the WASD keys and the arrow keys.

The first thing that I got seriously wrong was spending too much time fixing some minor bug, or implementing a minor feature. This lead to a lot of wasted time, that could've been used to code in the mechanics of the game, or adding polish to the game. Next time, I should focus on getting the core mechanic in, and then focus on filing down the rough edges.

Another thing I learnt is that  experimental things should be kept aside for game hams. You see, I initially planned to make a Doom-like first person shooter for this game jam, but the I ran into a serious technical issue -- I couldn't get the aiming down right. This was something I never tried to make before, and I knew that I couldn't spend the next two days of the game jam scrambling to try and fix the aiming of that game. So I scrapped it. Then came up with Double Down. In other words, for game jams, it's best to leave the experimental stuff for later, and try and stick with what you already can do.

The last lesson I learnt is specific to coding the game: keep it simple, stupid. I didn't know why I was making my code so complicated.

All in all, this game jam was quite fun. Now I need a break from my laptop screen.