Dropping the ball

So, I've written extensively in my journal about developing this game, but nothing here. This goes for all my games. Anyways, I didn't manage to finish a "complete" game before the deadline of the themed horror jam, so I decided to not push for it, given constraints in my personal life.

When the deadline loomed, I did in fact not even have a playable character for the player of the game.

How can that even be? 

Well, I started with a good intention: put 1 hour per day towards the project. That would add up to about 20 hours or something if we counted 20 days, and then I could do last-minute polishing near the deadline. And that worked very well for the first few days - until I started coding the AI for the enemy of the game, the entities lurking in the dark, trying to attack you. I spent more than 20 hours on fiddling with the AI for them, rewriting the logic several times over, until I was... not pleased with the results.

And therein lays the lesson: I had a roadmap, of sorts, and I had a plan. But my idea was to do one feature at a time until I had a game that was "done" - but getting stuck on the most complex feature (the AI) made sure I didn't have time to finish the rest of the features. 

So, for my next Jam I will make sure to make the game as a whole from start to finish before I start polishing anything. So, in this case, I would have skipped the AI for the enemies and their flocking behaviors, I would just have made sure they "existed" basically and made sure all other MVP requirements were there, like a playable character, flashlight mechanics, and of course, the tasks that the player has to complete to "win" the game.

I will spend at most 10 more hours on this game to publish something if anyone would ever be interested in having a look at what I was trying to accomplish.