11th hour

11th hour

this is part of a technical writeup, for the initial concept, see Jam Entry

Game Jams are short on time, and I was already expecting to have a severely limited amount of time within the period to actually make the game.

This resulted in a lot of corners cut. Some UI effect are just grey boxes. Dice animations slide instead of rolling, etc.

These are all liveable, but perhaps the most stressful part was the day before the Jam Ends: submitting the project. 

As this is a HTML5 game, it's designed to run in a browser. This means you're at the mercy of itch.io's hosting platform.

I rudimentarily knew the limitations (must be a zip file, filenames are case sensitive) but had missed one fairly important restriction:

• The ZIP file should not contain more than 1,000 individual files after extraction.
  

1000 files sounds like a lot, but remember, this game is fully-voiced and each snippet is a single file. I had originally planned 18 quests with 3 stages and half-a-dozen voiced cards per stage. That's several hundred files. 

On top of that, the monsters used in the game are picked at random out of a set of several hundred. To save on resources, these aren't pre-loaded (see previous devlog about preloading). Finally, while I did use sprite sheets where possible for the UI, it's simply much faster to iterate using distinct files. There's no chance to accidentally break one thing while working on another if they are different files. It also drastically cuts down on the amount of metadata needed to keep for each file.

Luckily, I had always planned to keep 1 day before the deadline to test the upload. This proved very useful, since I needed almost all of that time.

I ended up mass-deleting things like the monsters and more than 2/3'rd of the quests. The remaining quests had most of their stages removed. This still left over 100 audio clips in the .zip file. Fixing this properly would involve using audio sprites (packing all the .wav files into a single .wav file and recording the start/end positions in metadata). However, with 1 day left this was too risky to attempt, so the decision was made to cut the clips instead.

This was a fairly tough decision to make, but ultimately doesn't affect gameplay much. The quests that remain still work, and picking from a small set of monsters isn't too bad considering combat is not the core mechanic.