Wheelon Origin Wheelvangelion Postmortem

Postmortem

First off, I had a blast doing this jam. I never played Oblivion and was only vaguely aware of the dialogue wheel mechanic before Noodle's video about the cancelled Bass Reeves Can't Die game.

The "managing moody teenage mecha pilots" idea was basically the first thing I came up with a month before the jam started, so I had a while to think and overscope before actual coding started. Fortunately, I knew that this would be a nights and weekends project so I'd have to keep the scope small.

It still ended up being a slightly bigger game than intended and I was only able to finish it to the level of polish that I did thanks to some unforeseen events that opened up my schedule to allow for a little more development time.

What went right

• Keeping the scope reasonable.
• Using just (https://just.systems) to make building and deploying fast and easy, and making sure to deploy working html5 builds to itch from day 1.
• Finding music and sound effect creators that I liked before the jam start gave me options when actually building
• Nathan Hoad's Sound Manager plugin looked intimidating but was actually pretty easy to use and VERY handy. His example usage in the git repo also made creating my own volume settings screen very easy
• Jitspoe's console plugin was pretty helpful in testing (fun fact, it's in the production build! I meant to disable it but never got around to it.)

What went wrong

• Learning GIMP compositing and image manipulation at the last minute of the last day.
• Leaving the character and enemy portraits to the last day. Drawing isn't my strongest suit
• The left mouse button on my ancient MMO mouse started going out. Rest in peace, old mouse.
• My "code fast and loose for game jams" mantra hurt me a little bit with some infinite loops and weird bugs. If I'd thought about code architecture for some parts a little bit before just diving in, I probably could've saved some frustration at the cost of time.

What I learned

• Godot's FontVariants allow for stretching fonts and making reusable variants without having to import different fonts or manually edit a bunch of labels
• Learned to love the #region annotation, thanks to Shane's use of it in the Godot wheel template
• if you have a script with an @tool annotation that tries to call a signal in another script, that one needs to have @tool as well, or you'll get errors.

What I'll try to do in future projects

• Might be nice to have the version number in a file somewhere and update its value with just, then use it for itch.io build numbers, github release tagging, in-game display, etc
• storing different build versions instead of deleting the old ones might be nice/useful for "big" projects
• I would've loved to have had a more web-optimized build: smaller godot size, prune unused resources, etc. but oh well.