Results are in!

The results are in for the Metroidvania Month 15 jam and I'm extremely happy to say that WizVania got 4th place overall out of 71 entries!  This game is the largest project I've actually published and I'm very satisfied with where it ended up after a month of work.  There are definitely some quirks that need to be addressed and bugs to fix, but I think overall things went really well.  I'm currently working on the post-jam version with bug fixes, difficulty tweaks, and some extra polish and juice, but I'm taking my time with it.  It may be out sometime next week, but we'll see, after a month of stress, I'm not putting more energy into it than I want to lol.  In the meantime, I wanted to do a short postmortem, mostly for myself, and quickly go over some of the good and bad and etc of my time over the past month or so.

The Good:

• Godot as always continues to make getting things up and running really easy, it still has its limitations but this jam has just cemented it as my engine of choice
• Got a basic save/load system working, it's pretty rough and could be optimized, but it works and I know what I'd do differently next time
• I was able to get the majority of my original idea completed, while also handling the scope by cutting features super early on, which is something I've been working on getting better at

The Bad:

• While I cut a lot of content early on, scope creep still got the best of me and I was rushing to finish until late in the night the day the submissions were due.  
• If the rules hadn't been changed allowing bug fixes, there were a few small things I completely missed that might've made a huge difference to the players' experience, thankfully those were fixed but I'm still a bit annoyed I missed them.
• A general rule is that if the dev can beat a level easily, it's about the right difficulty for the average player, so I really should've remembered that when I was struggling with the levels myself lol

The etc:

• Time management is definitely something I still need to work on, but I'm glad that I was able to make sure I didn't get too burnt out over the course of the jam, working on everything solo for a month straight can be rough, I didn't want to be completely stressed the entire time
• It's not a bad thing to reuse assets from past projects, as long as rules allow if you're participating in a jam, no shame in taking a sprite from an old project and editing it to fit your new one
• Getting people to playtest your project, even if it's during a short game jam, is an extremely helpful thing when it comes to the design of your game, you only see your game through the eyes of a developer so get some players in there

Overall, I learned a lot during this project, and I'm glad to have participated.  Congrats to everyone involved!