Postmortem

What did we learn?
I think I have already learnt this thing before, from previous jams that I have been participating in, but perhaps someone could have some joy from reading it from me, I don't know...

1. Game States First

I felt I wouldn't be able to make a complete game anyhoo, but regardless, one has to somehow make the game playable - and that means it has to have a start screen, a game screen and some kind of state for win, loss, menu and game. And these things aren't that hard in to get done in Bevy (see: https://bevy-cheatbook.github.io/programming/states.html and https://docs.rs/bevy/latest/bevy/prelude/struct.State.html). To make systems run in certain states and not others... I find that a bit clunky, but once you have that in place, it's not that complicated to wrap your brain around it. What is not convenient is doing all of this with one hour left of the jam.

2. CI and release scripts

However you do it doesn't matter, but it is probably a good idea to set up the build-flow for your application. I have some simple bash-scripts that can do the job for me, others use GitHub actions and there are templates for that. You do not want to be fiddling with a wasm-build ten minutes before deadline.

3. Tight and Simple Gameplay

Gameplay comes first, it always does. The game has to be fun to play. The ones I have rated highly (so far) this jam have consistently had good gameplay - and what is that? For me, and I am 100% only talking about me here, it means real-time play (turn-based is just too slow for me), I am in control and I can affect the outcome by getting better and making better decisions. In my game, the player can basically just fly, it's bad, I should be ashamed of myself.

Those are my take-aways. I will try to create a crate of some sort for my own basic pleasure that I can perhaps re-use in future game-jams of the Bevy kind. Looking forward to it.