It is a miracle that I got this game done and (relatively) working on time.

SQ#4 was my first ever game jam that I actually finished, and I wanted to make something small but tight and well-polished. I came up with only a handful of mechanics that I thought interacted well with each other and would make for a fun game loop. But most of what I wanted to do was tell the story of these characters, directly or indirectly.

I feel like I kind of missed the mark on all of that. I made a game that required so much extensive work on my end just to function that I couldn't bug test as much as I wanted, I couldn't write the characters as much as I wanted, and the gameplay loop feels kind of flat. And being someone who's focused mainly on game design and writing, that feels... wrong.

I'm glad I got it done, and I hope it's a fun little game that people will play once or twice. I'm happy to have finished a game jam, finally, and I think in the future I'll try to go even smaller than this. Maybe I'll start with a story and work outward to mechanics instead of starting with a story concept and then trying to fit a story into the mechanics.

Unexpectedly, I kind of fell in love with the characters, and instead of having different scenarios with completely different individuals like I'd originally planned, if I eventually expand this to more scenarios, it'll probably be the same cast, just expanding slightly over time as their lives get simultaneously easier and harder.

It's not a terrible idea overall, just maybe outside the scope of what I really should've been aiming for in this game jam. But for my first game jam submission and my third finished game overall, I would say it's not terrible, and that I think I've learned a lot about how to handle game jams in the future by actively playing to my strengths instead of my weaknesses. (Looking at you, thousand-line random event script.)