Howdy folks
Now that I'm approximately conscious again, thought I'd throw together a quick post-mortem of Your Rules.
First off thanks for everyone who's reviewed it so far, there have been some low scores which was totally expected, and perfectly valid.
I was kind of ambivalent about the whole idea myself, but in the end decided to go with my gut. Like the game says, in the end it's what I wanted to do.
If you have played it, and are confused why -anyone- would even consider rating it highly; there is a little bit more to it than may be obvious if you're just looking at it as a shooter. If all you've seen is space, you haven't seen everything there is.
I tried to make it noticeable without making it blatantly obvious, but I can see how it'd get missed pretty easily by someone trying to power through a multitude of games and deliver a review on each. If you want to know the secret just PM me.
Notably, this was my first time collaborating on a Jam, which turned out to be a fun experience.
Tomato is pretty new to GM:S, and I've been giving them some tutorials on how everything works. While I intended to let Tomato program some of the simpler parts of the game, in there end there simply wasn't time, and so their contributions were strictly artistic this time around. T was great to work with and really impressed by their work ethic, they stuck with things all the way to the bitter end. I literally could not have completed the project in the timeframe without them though. 10/10, would compromise health sanity with again.
Beyond that, the overall experience was pretty similar to the jam grind I'm slowly getting used to. Slept about 4-5 hours per night, Everything began pretty organized but the coding behind the entire project reached Jenga Block status by Saturday evening, and by Sunday I was freely engaging in coding practices that would make me weep black tears of bitter shame on any other day.
(Also in a moment of pure yawning horror, I realized yesterday that I didn't remove any of the dev cheats. So uh.. have fun with those.
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I am pretty happy with how my half of the visuals turned out, as always I probably spent a little too much time on it, and as always I would have liked to put a bit more polish on everything.
Working on Defendergroove gave me pretty good grip on basic shooter mechanics, so I didn't have too much to learn there. (Incidentally, if you like shooters, check out Defendergroove, I promise it is 1,577,500% more enjoyable and prettier to listen to than Your Rules, and I'd love to see more people enjoying it.
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I did find what I felt like was a nice way to do transitions, and coded up a pretty decent background switcher and handler which I can probably use going onward.
Anyway. I think that's about all I have to say about that. There might be a Jelly (post-jam with more polish) version later, but I think that's mostly up to if T wants to go any further with it. There are certainly improvements that could be made on my side of things, but I think I'm pretty content. (and also still really busy)
Finally, thank you everyone who has played the game, I hope you enjoyed it, or at least tolerated it. I think working on it was a good experience for me. And thanks to the GMC and Jam organizers for putting all this on! Kudos as always.
I hope to get to play and review everyone's games in time, though due to my schedule it may not happen with any amount of quickness, sadly.
Take care everybody, and have fun.