With the game jam is almost over it's time to reflect on the game jam and creation off Spectro.

Spectro is a platformer build in the Unity engine. The goal of the game is to collect as many souls as possible until you lose all your lives or reach the end of the game.

When the game jam begun I limited myself to only work 2 hours a day at most (I have kids afterall). This ment I had to keep the scope off the game small enough and limit the number of features. And since I would be working alone I would need to find or create everything myself.

At first I created a simple placeholder player character since I cant stand looking at a coloured square for hours at an end. I decided to go for a grim reaper like character since I would be collecting souls.

While this seemed like a good idea, the character wasn't very interesting and would be replaced later by Spectro. In hindsight I should have sticked with a coloured square until I was ready to add the graphics.

After working on the core movement and pickup ability I added the first enemy of the game. Luckily since I limited the colour palette and spite sizes (16x16) I could iterate fast enough until the design looked somewhat decent.

To keep the logic simple I made the skulls move directly to the player and ignore the walls. They are ghostly afterall. This saved me a lot of time and made it possible to work on the other graphics.

I thought it would be funny that Rick's draggy dog would be an enemy so I played around with that idea for a bit. However I found that the character was a lot better than my current player character and Draggy Dog  Spectro was born,

Since I'm no good at sound design or SFX creation I used CC0 music and SFX. In my next jam however I would like to create my own music or work with a team member who excels in this area since I find the current sounds not matching up all that well.

After some game testing, it occurred to me that the single enemy type would be boring and easy to dodge or if tinkered with, to quick to enjoy the game. So I decided to ad a new enemy. And since the greatest enemy of a is a cat I thought why not.

After everything was done only the ui needed to be created, I opted use a render texture to allow for an animated soul next to the counter.
The lives would be created with a simple repeating texture

All and all I think the jam went alright,  Next time however I should assign more time to the initial design and planning of the game. Working with a team would be preferred as wel since this would split the work load better and make it possible to focus on all the aspects of the game making process.