Submitted my first game-jam game

First off, I regret not doing a devlog at all now as we're heading into the rating process. Though, being generally tight for time, I guess it only makes sense that I would avoid spending too much time on anything else other than development of the game.

So, right. This was my first time submitting to a game jam. However, my day job is being a professional game programmer.... So, I participated with my younger cousin (GucciSushi) who is in high school and has zero experience in game development, but was excited to learn! I just wanted to see what I could do with such short time constraints. And also, I've never completed a *personal* game project before, so I was also seeing this as an opportunity to do something for myself for once.

ALSO, I just learned about this cool game engine Godot (you may have heard of it :P), and I just really felt like making a game with it for some reason. So, this was also the first time for me to make a game in this game engine, so that was fun!

In the decided to go with something relatively generic. I didn't really know what I would be able to accomplish, and how much time I would actually be able to spend on the game. So I didn't want to go crazy. Seeing as I ultimately spent about 36 hours total on the game, I feel like I accomplished quite a lot in that time, and I'm quite happy with the results! If I had been able to spend all 48 hours on this game, I'm sure I could have polished it up enough to make it more playable, haha.

So, some things that went well:

• I think I did a good job at managing the time that I had. I created a Trello board and created tasks for myself and my cousin, and when I sat down to start working on the game, I pretty much immediately knew what I was going to be working on next.
• My cousin was able to quickly come up with ideas and create the actual level design of the game, which was awesome! I think he did a relatively good job, but we definitely could have tested it out more to figure out what actually worked best.
• Godot is a pretty slick engine and was pretty easy for me to figure things out when I needed to
• I think I did a relatively good job balancing polish vs feature work. Though... this probably only would have paid off if we did some play testing.

Things that could have gone better:

• We made the classic blunder and didn't have other people play our game before submitting. Alas, it is too difficult and no one will ever see all the work I put into the final boss (Yes! There's a boss! Good luck getting to it).
• I guess I could have actually planned out my time to fill out the whole 48 hours. Though, normal life gets in the way. So it goes.
• Godot can be pretty buggy in some pretty annoying ways. There were definitely a few hours wasted on just dealing with issues around that.
• Also, trying to use GitHub with Godot when my cousin hadn't used GitHub before, and I hadn't used Godot with GitHub before was a nightmare.
• You can only run the standalone version of the game with the debugger because otherwise it crashes with the player dies. This has to do with some oversight from me in how Godot handles collisions and the destruction of objects during a collision. Whoops. 
• I stayed up pretty late working on this game which may have had negative impacts on my health.
• I half-heartedly implemented a knock-back system that desperately needed attention in order to make the game more playable.
• Waaaaaay too many enemies. Created a pretty steep difficulty _wall_.

Ultimately, I think a lot of the issues could have been fixed with even a little bit of play testing. This seems like one of the most common problems with game jam games though. Stupid time constraints, hahaha. 

I also need to work on my animation skills. More importantly, making animations more quickly, and designing for animations from the beginning. They're probably one of the most important things to polishing a game. Mostly because of how much it improves the feedback the user experiences.

There are also other small things that require that tiny bit of delay or extra feedback to really make it clear to the user what's happening.