GameOff2019 voting has officially ended!  Thank you so much to everyone who participated, took the time to play / vote / give feedback!

Transilio placed 18th out of 236 entries (and around 3.5k original entrants).  I am incredibly proud and humbled by the great reception that we received.  Not only was this my first game jam, but we pulled this off with a rag tag group of individuals who never me each other before; 4 people in 3 different time zones.  Thanks, team!  

Given voting is over, I was able to push a build I have been sitting on for a while that fixes a couple issue / adds some quality of life improvements.  Specifically:

- Fixed the bug that causes the player to freeze when jumping and pressing sideways at the same time

- Added the ability to navigate and click on the UX buttons via the keyboard

Transilio Next Steps / Thoughts:

I learned so much through this process and am so thankful for the opportunity and all the people who checked out the game!  

One of the biggest design challenges in retrospect was the balance between teaching the mechanics (especially the jump mechanic) and making the puzzles engaging / challenging.  Got some feedback around some people who had trouble understanding how the jump mechanic worked and others who said we shouldn't have put text boxes / explained how things worked.  I think if I were to more seriously pick development of this game back up, it would be important to clean up the theme / art direction to make that main mechanic more obvious / understandable.  Something like making the player character a spring that clearly stored energy when it landed / making the art and animation more obvious in that.

And that brings me to the next big piece of feedback:  The art / visuals weren't good.  I totally understand that / was worried about it upon release.  As someone who has never been very 'artistic' I tend to focus less on those aspects when I play a game (and develop games).  Goes to show how important it is to have a well rounded team!  It also taught me that if I am going to try to get a role like producer / on the production side in industry, this type of thinking is a pitfall I will have to avoid!  Need to ensure I pay just as much attention to an art director as the lead game designer / programmer etc... etc...  All of that said, our artist did drop out so we scrambled a bit to put something presentable together and overall I am happy with what we did accomplish in terms of visuals (especially given the month time limit).  

As for next steps, for now I am going to put this project on the back burner.  One of the things that I really learned about myself through this process was that I am just not a huge fan of puzzle games (especially less action based puzzle games).  While I have some ideas for level designs / future mechanics to implement, I am not super excited about them.  That being said, there are a lot of building blocks to work with and this is an open source project.  If anyone is interested, you should check out the GitHub repo an make some levels of your own (for those of you who know Unity) https://github.com/Dautery91/game-off-2019.  If anyone wants to reach out / has questions, i'd be happy to chat!

Next on my radar:  Now that I am finally starting to get settled post move, I want to add another finished (though small) game to my portfolio before GDC 2020, were I will be doing a lot of networking etc...  I also want to ensure I push myself to work on features that I dont already know how to implement / keep learning a lot.  Recently I have been really loving Enter the Gungeon and am a long time fan of The Binding of Isaac / Rougelikes.  So for my next project ill be working on some actiony rouglike type of game like that!  Really intrigued / want to learn more about procedural generation and game design so I think it'l be a really fun project!  If anyone is interested / might want to help, feel free to reach out!

Anyways, thanks again to everyone and my team for this jam.

-Drake