This was me and Ethan’s fourth game jam and each time I feel like we learn a lot and make a better game. We also had some extra help from Baph this time around which was super awesome and I’m glad we worked so well together as a trio. By the end of the jam I was a little disappointed in myself because I wasn’t able to figure certain things out in time and opted to make the game playable rather than everything I wanted it to be. But in hindsight I feel like I’ve come a long way as a programmer in Godot. I was rarely looking at tutorials and was able to program most of the mechanics in ways that followed good object oriented programming guidelines. I did spend a good amount of time modifying the engine to suit our specific needs. In the end I wasn’t able to add any saving or really finish the level decoration/music. But I feel I really did all I could do with the time given, I worked an average of 4-6 hours a day for a month and a half and was able to put in all the mechanics I wanted and felt really comfortable with the environment. 
This was also the largest scale game we’ve ever done. The caves level is the largest level we’ve ever tried to design. Because of that, we really wanted to rely on tilesets so the scene tree wouldn’t get too cluttered. This was in opposition for our desire to use more of Godot’s lighting engine. Because scenes that use lighting can’t be contained in a tileset in the current version of Godot, I made a script that could find certain tiles on load that referenced scenes and replaced the tiles with their scene counterparts on load. This was super useful because it saved computer processing power when designing the level, due to no lighting engine being used in the editor. I also made certain scenes detect when the player was close enough to see the, so that more processing was saved (mainly the wind turbines because they have particle fx).

Designing a somewhat difficult liminal puzzle was a goal of mine. I tried to make the first level feel like you were trapped in a loop or at least cyclical, with the player returning to the same room from different paths. I drew out the entire level first on graph paper, one version with the lights on and one with the lights off. 
After the jam ends, I want to circle back around and finish the game. Not add any new levels, but polish what’s there so it feels more complete. As with every jam, we’re going to get a lot of good feedback so I want to take that into consideration and squash any bugs others find. If we can also finish decorating everything, add in the rest of the sound/music, and add certain quality of life improvements (saving the game, graphics quality adjustments) I’ll feel a lot better and ready to move on to what we’ve planned next.