How Procjam Went

This project isn't finished, but Procjam is and I do have a version of the game up.

First, I want to say that I loved the general spirit of Procjam. It encourages anyone to make a game, which I think is really cool, and encourages participants to take care of themselves and not push themselves to try to meet the deadline.

How the Game Works

The basic idea is that you are the receptionist for city hall, and you need to figure out both how to solve the problems of the citizens who come up to the desk and how they want the problem to be solved. For example, lonely citizens want you to talk to them in addition to solving their problem. I'm still not sure what I think about this concept. I oscillate from thinking this is a good-weird idea to thinking it's a bad-weird idea. 🤷

What Went Well

Like my previous project, Endocrinauts, my biggest success was honestly getting more familiar with the tools, Clojure and Quil.  Coding and fixing problems went faster and were more fun, honestly.

I'm much more happy with the graphics this time around. It's not anything super fancy, but I think the combination of the background image and the avatars are a nice, if basic, look.

Another thing that went well was adapting the graphics when I couldn't find the assets I needed. My initial plan for the graphics was to try to make the avatars look like a person standing in front of a generic waiting room background that was meant to stand in for the city hall.

In a similar vein, I basically invented the character of Mayor Tatiana as I went along. One of the character packs I found was a queer-themed one, so I came up with a queer backstory for her. (I'm not going to reveal it here because I want to put it into the game first.)

What Didn't

One of the biggest issues was simply not having enough time. I was busy with work a few days before the end, which meant I didn't have time to finish the game, including:

• In-game dialog.
• End screen, including win/loss conditions.
• Full gameplay

Since unexpected busyness is unavoidable, I think the best approach is just having the basics of the game (start menu, gameplay, and win/lose states) finished relatively early in the jam—maybe by the halfway mark? I have a bad habit of procrastinating on the ending, so for my last game (Endocrinauts), I finished the ending screen with hours to spare, and for this game, I still don't have an ending, almost two weeks later.

What's Next

Like everyone who starts a game during a jam and doesn't finish it, I want to finish the game later. Aside from it being embarrassingly unfinished, I also want to finish it because the game is far enough along that it's fun and easy to add more stuff to it.

I also want to try to add mouse/touch screen support because I haven't used that feature of Quil before and because I want it to be usable on at least tablets.