Postmortem — Jam Edition

So close, yet so far…

Battle Commander was released incomplete.

I had put rather significant time into this game but couldn’t quite turn it into a game fast enough.

Despite that, I still felt it was necessary to publish my work, even if it is an incomplete buggy mess.

Why?

Sometimes a publisher has to ship the game in whatever state it’s handed to them.

Sometimes a developer simply runs out of time or other resources to realize the original vision.

In my case, if I didn’t publish it for the jam, I might publish it long after I had ceased to care about it at all.

LINK! was sort of the same way, but usable.

It wasn’t quite ready for The Tool Jam deadline but I scrambled to throw something together that would get my point across, which I think I did rather well.

After the jam, I spent a lot of time to get it to a point where I’m happy with it.

That was two months of work to get it to the point where I would have loved to have it ready for the jam release.

Battle Commander is in much worse shape, but I don’t want to see my effort being wasted. I really think there’s a fun game in there.

I made an honest attempt at getting Battle Commander up-to-spec for release, I was even looking forward to drawing up some cool cover art.

But as the deadline quickly approached, 5 days becomes 3 days, 2 days becomes 10 hours, I realized there was little hope I’d be done in time.

Buttons

Buttons are not always straight forward. Think about pressing a button to submit something and analyze every step.

• What happens when I hover the mouse over the button?
• What happens when I click?
• After I’ve held it for a bit?
• When I release the button?
• Okay, I’ve kept the button held down but moved the mouse away from the button, what happens then?
• What if I’m still holding down the button and, okay now bare with me, move the mouse back over the button?

And there’s at least a dozen more combinations I had to deal with that I’m not going to list and a dozen more my friend will find that’ll have me stumped.

So, there goes a few days.

Simply put. Buttons are a major pain in the ass.

There’s simpler ways to implement them. Only counting what happens when you directly press the button is super simple. Then sprinkle in a few edge cases you’d like to cover and you’re good to go.

That’s what I did for LINK and it works fine…

But they’re becoming difficult to reason with.

So yes, the truth comes out. I’ve been experimenting with button design for most of LOWREZJAM2021. You caught me!

With a few tweaks I’ll be able to port the button code from Battle Commander over to LINK and adding a button will be simple.

Tee. Fucking. Em.

But! More on that later.

I found my hand-written and scribbled on design sheets which helped me remembered why I wanted to make this game in the first place.

You know, before I fell into the Pit of Feature Creep.

Meet Battle Commander

Everything has an origin story. This is one of Battle Commander who’s just trying to do their job but the equipment is broken and nothing works, so in the mean time, they might as well get familiar with what does.

Battle Command is incomplete but so wasn’t LINK.

I’ve already worked on a few new events and plan on adding a few more. I’d of course love to add a few other features I had in mind so we’ll see what happens.

The thing I learned is everything can be improved. Just today, I’ve edited Battle Commander’s game page at least a half-dozen times.

Let’s face it, I don’t care what my projects look like when I release them. Few things come out smelling like roses.

What matters more is when I’m finished.

I’m not finished with Battle Commander, yet.

LOWREZJAM2021 is just the beginning.