Jam Postmortem Thoughts!

Thank you to everybody who has played and decided to leave some feedback. Very much appreciate y'all even giving this little mess a chance! I wanted to take a bit of time and reflect in a more static manner on what I think went right, and what went wrong, during this jam!

To start with the tough love, what I think went wrong:

• Over. Scoping. 
  I could've just made a simple rts. had all the mechanics for that, but I personally wanted to try something different with population growth and was trying to emulate some real genetics simulation in some capacity. Came up with a cool system, it DID work, but using it slowed me down and made the scope needlessly large.
• No Refined Loop in 7 Days
  
I had set a very specific goal for myself to get a solid gameplay loop in half way through the jam, or I would cut features to make it work. And this does sit somewhere between overscoping and time management, so I focus on the fact that either part resulted in no loop. I think this is a flaw I've almost always struggled with, but I see that habit now, thanks to this project! I now see how important it is to make it a game AS SOON AS POSSIBLE then do all the fancy stuff later. 
• Poor time management
This sort of naturally ties into my previous two statements. Either way, I did not manage my time effectively for a few days, and tried to push myself to work on the trickier systems while I was fighting a weird cold rather than doing art or gathering sound effects, etc. Either way, this is more of an additive factor, not a direct cause. Ultimately a smaller scope would've been feasible.

What I think went right:

• Actually used a little of my already existing code!
I leveraged a few key individual components for input, character movement, and some misc interpolation methods from other projects which helped tremendously in time expenditure! I also improved my implementations as a result of using them.

• Most mechanics were implemented
I actually got the mechanics I needed successfully put together, I just didn't give myself something simple enough to assemble quickly!
• Overall the most complete jam entry I've had thus far
I succeeded in having something in all categories: art, sounds, animation, music,  mechanics i needed to make a complete little game. Just didn't put it all together and had some gaps to fill in

So some core aspects that have been noted in comments and by myself include the following set of actionable steps I'm going to take to get this game polished up:

• Fixing the lack of fully complete gameplay loop 
  • Fixing wild animals so they don't just stand still
  • Actually covering the whole map with things to interact with and gather from
  • Making reproduction of units stable, and purposeful
• Guiding information for the player
  • A smaller tutorial map present the gameplay loop with
  • A help menu with information relevant to the systems in the game so if nothing else there's just something that explains things if I fail to make a good tutorial or lack info in tooltips
• A construction system
  • Just a simple spend resource to place object kind of system.
  • Houses for people to live in would be nice, and could naturally lead to population growth (making it more like a simulator)
  • Defensive structures like towers and walls
  • A training area which produces fighters
  • A tool shed which produces workers
  • Jail area (as part of stretch possibility below)
• And as a stretch possibility: random attack parties of humans
  • Could just be random humans, with a chance to kill or incapacitate.
  • Then the player can choose to capture them, or kill them and harvest a weapon and maybe tools
  • Could be a way to introduce new genes to the town's gene pool which would be important with my systems

I absolutely will be looking into doing at LEAST a few days more work on this to get it where I'd hoped it would be, and I think overall I suffered from simply picking something that I could not get the core down before wanting to make overly detailed elements like the likely non-visible gene system behind pawns that allows them to get better/worse generationally at maintaining their stats. 😅 

All that said, I had a ton of fun, huge thanks to Jern, Sciants, and all the sponsors for y'alls involvement this jam! And thanks for the motivation to work on something new, and inspiration I've gained as a result! 👍

And thanks to anybody who checks out this little concept and gives it a chance. I appreciate y'alls time and thanks for sharing your thoughts.