I have decided to share my thoughts after every jam submission. For future reference and to reflect on the process.

This jam I entered alone. My team members were pretty burned out from the Godot Wild which took place a little earlier. I could not participate so I craved for the next Godot Wild. Fortunately my wait was not too long as I discovered Oink jam. The theme resonated with me, I had ideas immediately, started prototyping and well... decided to give it a go. Alone.

Lesson learned: in the future I want to avoid going solo. My main learning. While it's fun to throw ideas around unconstrained, I lack the visual art skills to present a complete experience to fellow jammers. Which contradictory to my mission: create an absolutely enjoyable 5-10 minutes for anyone checking out the game. 

Still Oink jam was too good to let it pass: Enough time, sensible rating criteria, progress tracking, awesome theme, so here we are.

My most important learning this time was that level design should not be an afterthought. I always start with the mechanics and lose myself there, then move over to assets and animation and whatever time is left (which is usually very little) is poured into levels. I have vague ideas on how mechanic X (say... the jump in VamPig) or enemy type Y would play totally nice if the level looked like Z. But I never put that to test until it's too late. Levels are way of introducing the player to mechanics, for world building and telling a story as well as even make tutorials unnecessary if done correctly. Ideally one team member would start with levels once the first prototype and first validation of the original idea is kind of successful. Ideally, the team is 3-4 ppl, I think.

I feel like level design is an underrated (by me) way of creating a smooth gameplay experience

Another learning is definitely complexity, balance and testing. I already built a skill tree with 6 skills but cut them down to 3. Because it was crazy testing different levels with different skill combinations to check if the overall balance is not completely broken. While I love simple games that get more complex via upgrades (that's why I added upgrades to VamPig) if you don't have the time to constantly check the balance - better reduce complexity and combinatorics to a minimum.

But some stuff went really well. I was able to hand off early prototypes of my gameplay to my fellow teammembers and realized how I would have to set up tutorials to allow them to grasp the gameplay, which was obvious to me, but well, not to anyone else. I think I never had a jam where I could gather feedback so early in the process - which was good. The game was completely unfair and tough in the beginning. Even more so than now. It's tough now mainly because of the lack of content. I felt like replaying a level 2-3 times would be okay in this case. Which is probably wrong but this is how I decided after realizing I could not put out 4-5 levels as I planned.

Also by deploying regularely to gather feedback I avoided the "web export does not work" effect at the end of the jam. Continous delivery of new game versions and testing it on the actual platform went 100% right this time.

If anything else comes to my mind I will add this here. 

Thanks for reading