APRIL FOOL'S JAM was a game jam where the only rule was to make a game that played some sort of joke on the player. I've been itching to make a collectible card game for a very long time, so I thought I would use this game jam as an opportunity. Card Fools is a single player mini ccg.
The Scope...
The very first thing that came to my mind when I first decided to do this game was with the problem of scope. It was definitely challenging trying to wrap my head around a theme, game rules, and cards within a week and it also didn't help that I recently switched to using Godot. I've been using Godot for about a month now (made a few small prototypes) and I thought participating in a game jam with it would definitely make me more familiar with the game engine faster. Even though the game didn't turn out exactly how I would have liked, it was enjoyable making it. I'll definitely have a smaller scoped game for my next game jam.
What I Thought Went Well
Well for one I had fun...so I think that was a success in itself. Also I like that the game has multiple cards and opponents to unlock. As I said before, Godot was a blast to use and create in so I'll continue using that game engine in the future. I accomplished my main purpose for participating in this game jam with was to scatch my ccg making itch and learn Godot.
What I Thought Didn't Go So Well
I should have worked with a team for this game jam, especially for the artwork. I didn't have much time to add as much detail as I wanted to a lot of the cards. The game design was rushed on the cards and I wished I would have liked to flesh out using attack and defense cards more. The music and sound could have been better as well. I could have tied in light story elements together, but I was already limited with time and resources.
Last Minute Scare
One thing that I definitely recommend for a game jam is to first export and test the game early on in the dev cycle. Unfortunately for me, I didn't do this. I ran into an issue with loading a singleton in Godot hours before the game jam deadline. I enabled debugging on export and I was able to determine that the singleton wasn't being auto loaded because the preload() scene calls were failing because of incorrect paths!? I "double checked" the paths, searched online for answers, and I looked at where the error was in the engine code at gdscript.cpp, and I wasn't getting anywhere. Luckily I stuck it through and found out that the casing was different for one of the folders in the path of the preloaded scenes. I'm assuming that this error would have been discovered earlier had I been developing on linux or mac, since Windows isn't case sensitive.
Conclusion
I'm now at game jam game number 4! Out of all the game jams, I would list this as my first or second favorite that I participated in. I'll definitely strive for more polish in my next game jam! If you would like to check it out, here is the link: https://chukobyte.itch.io/card-fools