Postmortem: What I Learned; How I'll do Better

So, my game kinda sucks and was mostly unfinished. I probably should've lead with that or made that clearer in the description. 

This was my first game dev project in a number of years (at least 4 I think?) I haven't really touched game development since I got a full-time job doing boring corporate software development. I found this community and thought I'd try to make _something_ and when the jam was announced, I thought that that would be the kick I needed to get going. It was, but the result of my atrophied game development ability, along with poor time-management led to something, well, bleh. 

My initial thought was to try and recreate a childhood favorite flash game (625 Sandwich Stacker) from memory (and also horny) in an engine I half-knew and haven't used in many years and at least 1 major version ago. I was kinda in over my head. No, I was totes in over my head. I'm happy to have gotten something that's at least semi-working out, but I'm not happy with the quality. 

I thought that just doing the basic tutorial to "refresh my memory" would be enough to get me going and get me something that'd resemble that flash game and work and be great. But it was not. Nowhere near enough. I really underestimated how much time everything would take. I didn't build in enough time for debugging. Maybe I should've spent that first weekend of the jam better. I don't know. 

I thought  I would've gotten the falling ingredients part done in like a couple hours on the first day, then work on adding different "stations" that have different ingredients for the rest, then bug test, then add in an intro "cutscene" and different endings the next weekend. Along with just chipping away at stuff when I had time after work. Haha, no.  Just getting the food to fall and stick took the entire first weekend (I am very bad at hitbox math). I thought it'd be fast to implement a swaying thing as the sandwich gets taller, the extremely broken and unoticable effect in the game as released took hours. 

I decided to cut my losses and at least have something on the board.   Having something is better than nothing right? Right? 

Probably? I don't know. 

Thank you and sorry to everyone who played!