Power Play is as finished as it was able to get before the deadline and was submitted successfully!

It was fun and I'm very happy with what I got done in such a limited amount of time, especially since I wasnt able to work on it at all on Friday.  There were also some hiccups with the Godot 4.5 beta, but I'm pretty sure it was with the plugin I was using, not Godot itself.  Besides that beta 3 was great to use, and I'm looking forward to the full release!  I am completely fried though, and I'm not sure if I can keep up with a 48 hour jam anymore, or I need to cut the scope of my ideas WAY back so I'm not crunching the whole time at 100% lol.  Speaking of scope, I wanted to talk about the big thing I did wrong this time around.

I didn't plan ANYTHING

It's a 48 hour jam, so obviously most people arent going to flesh out super in depth design documents or anything, but even just having a list of mechanics and goals is a huge help.  Because I only had ideas and nothing actually concrete, I ended up working a bit backwards on this, but more about that next. I knew what I wanted, an Overcooked like game about keeping the lights on at an arcade.  Seems simple enough.  The initial idea was more like Plate Up, you place objects and have to earn cash and favor to reach the next day, otherwise game over.  Obviously for 48 hours thats insane and I cut the scope back to just "keep the lights on" for as long as you could.  What does that mean though?  What mechanics are there?  What's the level design supposed to be like?   

No plan meant no direction

Because I didnt have any of my own questions answered, I ended up working on the project backwards.  By that I mean instead of deciding "there will be one level with X mechanics, lets get an idea for what the level should be", I instead started with "what systems are there and how do they scale so I can make SO MANY things".  Without any direction, I also didnt know what these "things" were going to be, which mean a lot of refactoring, hacks, and tweaks I probably shouldnt have needed.  As I worked on one thing, the hazy image of another would come into view, but that just meant more unclear objectives.  Before you know it you're grasping at all these concepts and ideas that you dont really know that direction you're going in. and without that direction it's very easy to work on the wrong thing first.

Over-abstracted and underutilized

Over-abstraction has haunted me for years.  I always feel like I need to make sure everything is as scalable as possible, everything can be extended or used or abstracted away for endless flexibility.  This is a death sentence in a lot of cases, and a major waste in others.  For me specifically, it meant I spent so much time making classes for things like PowerSources and Playables so I could break out all these new things that when it was finally time to make the things I had little time to do so.  Was I able to get some objects working quick because of the aforementioned classes?  Sure.  Could I have gotten the same result by just coding them as I went for the specific use cases and just abstracting as needed?  Also yes.

A big thing I wish I did different was figuring out a rough idea of the mechanics and the level design first.  Then instead of making a bunch of abstract classes and functionality that never really gets used, I could focus on each thing as it came and only write whats needed. It just needs to exist and work, we can abstract things away later.  This most likely would've given me more time for polish, playtesting, and bugfixing than I had.  I've gotten a lot better at this than I used to be, but this project definitely showed it still exists in me somewhere, waiting to jump out and mangle my projects lol.

"Yeah but scalable code is ideal and saves so much time in the future!"  I hear some of you saying, and you're right.  But does an extremely flexible class implementation really matter if you never actually finish the project?  Better to have a finished hacky mess than an unfinished, unshared masterpiece of code.

To summarize, I wish I planned better at the start.  Knowing what you're making with firm goals and concepts makes things so much easier than just having an idea of what you want and wandering the fog until you hit something.  I'm exhausted but I had fun, and I dont want to stop doing jams, but if I do more short ones like this I'm going to have to really thing about my planning and scope management!

And if you take anything away from this it should be to just make the thing, you can make it better later.