Thanks for playing Dr. Shrink and the Horrors of the Infinite!

Migrated blog post from ldjam.com

Thank you to everyone who played Dr. Shrink and the Horrors of the Infinite during the jam! I'm absolutely thrilled with my results and I can't thank everyone that played and reviewed it enough.

I know I'm late to the post-jam-blog-post-train, but especially since this was my first game jam, I thought I would take some time to reflect on my experience, and give the game the post-mortem treatment. 

Post-Jam Version

Now that the jam is over, I've gone through each the major bugs that people encountered in the game, and fixed them all. The new post-jam version is available on my itch.io to play right now! (There's a devlog post over there with all the listed bug fixes) 

Play the post-jam version here!

## The Results

Overall, I am extremely pleased with the results. This was my first game jam, and I completed it all solo, so scoring sub-35 in both Innovation and Theme has made me absolutely over the moon! I'm also very pleased with the rest of the results. I reckon 268th overall is a pretty respectible result, but at the end of the day, the rankings honestly haven't been as important to me as the immediate feedback from people who played the game. 

Feedback

I think my biggest takeaway from this whole thing has been that feedback is absolutely critical for creating an enjoyable experience for your players. I found both the positive and negative feedback extremely satisfying and enlightening, and I genuinely think it will make me into a better game developer. 

The most consistant piece of constructive criticism that I got for Dr. Shrink (other than the music not looping 🤦) was that the game was missing a few quality-of-life features that make platformers feel better to play - namely Coyote Time and Jump Buffering. I was aware of these features before I embarked on this jam, but given that it was my first time making a platformer, I was mostly just attempting to get the game out the door, and didn't think those sort of "fancy" platformer features would make enough of a difference that people would notice. Well, they noticed, so I will for sure be adding these things to future platformers in future jams (and they've been added to the post-jam version 😁).

What Went Right? 

I think that ultimately, Dr. Shrink's strongest feature is its idea. Any time a streamer or one of my friends played the game in front of me for the first time, their first comment was almost always "Oh, this is a cool idea!" I think the game's results pretty clearly reflect this, as I scored very well on both Innovation and Theme. 

The game actually scored quite well in Humor, being 24 places shy of the top 100 in that category. This is obviously great to hear, and can mostly be credited to my derranged brain at 2am on the night before submission implementing all the dialogue in one hour on very little sleep (this includes the unhinged title that I gave the game).

In the end, I'm actually quite pleased with the level of challenge that the game seems to present people. I was worried that it might be a bit too easy, but people genuinely seemed to struggle getting to the end of the game. This is a double-edged sword, as I will mention in the next section, but I think there's a positive to be gleaned from making a genuinely challenging experience that completionists feel like they have to beat.

What Went Wrong? 

Conversely to what I just mentioned, although the game was indeed challenging - which can be fun - much of the challenge that the jam version of Dr. Shrink poses is through tricky platforming with ungraceful controls (see Feedback section above), and enemies that are unavoidable in certain parts of the game. These two factors aren't the end of the world, and the game is definitely beatable, but the challenge can definitely feel unfair, and a decent number of players that played the game infront of me got frustrated and put the game down without reaching the end.

The other major thing that went kind of wrong is that my prioritising of tasks was definitely a bit out of wack when I was creating the game. I spent some time early creating sprites for things that could have just used placeholders while I created the actual gameplay itself. The final build of the game was also the first build of the game that actually played like a game from start to finish. This was stressful, and lead to a lot of sleep deprevation. 

What Have I Learned For Future Game Jams? 

The biggest thing that I have learned is that I absolutely love game jams. It seems like it is indeed true what they say - Game Jams are the best thing for learning game development, and motivating you to Just Make Games ™️. I am absolutely going to be back for Ludum Dare in the future, and I'm already planning on participating in the GitHub Game Off starting tomorrow 🙂 

Otherwise, I think I have a decent idea as to what kind of things you need to prioritise when you're jamming. Gameplay needs to take top priority, and if there's a way to make the controls smoother, you should try to make time to add them. Additionally, having a submitable version of the game at the end of each day sounds like a good idea that would reduce stress a decent amount. 

I think that next time, I'm not going to get quite so hung up on the purity of preserving the game in the exact state that it was in at time of submission. I saw a lot of other jammers link to a post-jam version while voting was still happening. I was reluctant to do this myself because I had assumed that it wasn't within the spirit of the Jam, but I see now that I was overthinking it, and giving the players a post-jam version is just simply a good idea to portray your vision for the game more accurately. 

Finally, I'd really like to try my hand at creating entirely my own assets for future jams (either solo, or working with an artist). I ended up going with a mixture of self-made assets (mostly the background and level art), and some licenced / open-source sprites that I found on the web. This worked for Dr. Shrink since I was learning a whole lot during the Jam and was low on time, but I really like the idea of having a complete vision presented at the end of the jam. 

## Conclusions and the Future of Dr. Shrink

When all is said and done, I am just absolutely thrilled with how this experience went. I loved making the game, I loved having others play the game, and I LOVED playing all the other games that you all created with your incredible talents. 

As for Dr. Shrink, now that the major bugs have been fixed, I am happy to put him up on the shelf and leave him floating as a singularity in the vast emptiness of the infinite, at least for a while. I think it's likely that I may come back and make some changes, but if I do that it'll definitely be a "Version 2" that I'd like to take some time with (and fix up the code. It's a god damn mess). That being said, if I decide never to do that, that's okay too 😄

With that, I think the post-mortem is complete, so thank you anyone who read this (seriously, this is very long), and see you all in April for LD57 ✌️

[One final shameless link to the post-jam version of the game]