From game jam to final release - my experience creating my first commercial project!

The Jam:

Over a year ago, I participated in the 2023 Linux Game Jam . There was no mandatory theme, but some optional prompts were provided. One of those was "Fractal", which sparked my imagination and somehow gave me the idea for a combat-less, dodge-based bullet hell game with projectiles that change in different fractal patterns! Over the next 11 days, I created a small game about an uneducated polar bear who has to save the world from fractal invaders who trapped all the scholarly bears to help them. Naturally, the game wasn't anything as grand as what I imagined in my head, it only had one world (plus a few levels in another area, but I didn't have time left to make it mechanically different so it was basically just a retexture...) and a few enemy turret types. The game was pretty rough, but I was proud of it (it was the best game I've made by that point, I had released about 7 other game jam games before but they were all smaller in scope). The jam participants also seemed to like it, ranking it in 8th place out of 44 with an overall score of exactly 4.00!

Some pictures of the rough jam version:

Expanding to a full release:

So, a bit over a month after the end of the jam, I finished participating in all the game jams I had scheduled for that summer vacation, and still had a whole month of vacation left. Since I believed I could accomplish a lot more with Frozen Fractals (spoiler: I was right!), I decided to try spending just a month or two (haha, hilarious joke...) expanding and polishing it, and then release it as my first commercial game. As mentioned above, I already had a pretty big catalogue of small jam games released, and wanted to try my hand at something bigger.

So, filled with excitement, I sat down and created a Libreoffice document where I listed all the changes I wanted to add to the game, ranging from new worlds and enemies, bosses for each area, different NPCs, new cutscenes, ability trees, different game modes and modifiers, and more! Eventually I ended up with a huge to-do list, and it was time to start working!

Every single morning during the vacation, I worked for 3-4 hours and started checking things off the to-do list. My motivation was pretty high for most of that month (aside from a few unmotivated days here and there), and I managed to get a lot of work done - mostly creating the new worlds and enemies and redoing some of the jam game art, but also some more minor additions and polishing.

A picture of the Fire Demon, one of the bosses I created during this time:

However, the month soon ended, and of course I haven't finished the checklist, there was about half of it left. I knew I won't have energy for gamedev during school days, but I planned to work on the game during weekends and holidays. For the first month or so of school I did just that, and managed to make decent progress on the game. But then, the thing that all gamedevs dread arrived...

The Burnout:

After over two months of working on Frozen Fractals, and with school and work taking much of my time, I started to get sick of this project and didn't want to keep working on it. For basically the entire year, I haven't done nearly any gamedev at all except for one small jam during a short holiday, and poor Frozen Fractals was collecting virtual dust on my laptop. I don't think there's any gamedev who hasn't experienced burnout at least once, and it always sucks... Burnout is definitely something to watch out for, both beginner and experienced devs can push themselves too hard, and it's better to take a short break earlier and get refreshed than to keep working and end up taking a muuuch longer break...

Dealing With The Burnout:

Well, I don't have any magical advice that you haven't heard before, and to this day I still feel kinda burned out on this game and want to move on to the next project. However, I did manage to push through and force myself to the finish line (eventually).

So, it was July 2024, the end of the school year, and once again time for the awaited summer vacation. I've barely done any gamedev that school year, and I was ready to finally get back to it. Naturally, I warmed up with a couple of jams (I'm totally not an addict, I promise!!), and then decided that it's time to stop procrastinating and get back to Frozen Fractals, which just had its first birthday. I was still burned out on it, but forced myself to finish, since not abandoning projects is very important to me (and to this day, out of nearly 15 games there's only one project I abandoned since it had a lot of design issues, R.I.P The King's Downfall...). First, I went back to my todo list and made the difficult call to delete some of the tasks there since they were out of scope. It wasn't anything too important, and I still kept all the vital changes that I mentioned at the beginning. And so, I got back to work, not every single day like the previous year and not nearly as enthusiastically,  but I did manage to enjoy the process again and get work done.

The Finish Line:

The summer vacation ended and it was time for school again, but this time I was very close to finishing the game, plus this school year isn't nearly as stressful as the last one, so while there was some procrastination involved, I managed to finish the game within about a month! The long awaited moment was here, but it wasn't the end quite yet. Since this is a commercial release and not just a small jam game, I had to do things I never did before, like creating a trailer and promotional images. Also, since I'm still underage (only half a year left!), there were some bureaucratic details required to allow me to sell the game (taxes aren't fun!). Due to those details, I had to wait until January 2025 for the release, but that was alright as it gave me more time to iron out the details. And it's a good thing too, because during a Vimlark livestream where Nick playtested games made by the viewers, he playtested the game (I had a private version uploaded for my friends to playtest)... And let's just say it could've went better... 

For Vimlark, the game was basically a rage game even on the casual difficulty, and he also pointed out several design flaws. I did have several other playtesters who didn't have these struggles with the game, but it's good to remember that different people have different experiences with the same thing. And so, only a couple of months before the game's release, I had some big balancing and design changes to make. I made the first area much easier, improved the tutorial, and scrapped one mechanic I had - there were two different dashes in the game, a short dash and a long dash, and with Vimlark's help I realized it was excessive and confusing to new players, so I merged them into one dash. Also, for hardcore players who want a hard challenge, there's still the challenging difficulty, plus optional run modifiers that make things much harder, so I didn't make the game too easy with these changes.

In case it wasn't clear, I'm super thankful about the negative feedback, Vim was very kind and without him pointing out these details, the game would've been released at a much worse state!

So, here we are at release day! It's been a long journey, but I'm glad I stuck with this game and refused to give up on it! Here are some conclusions I want to end with, and lessons I've learned!

Conclusions:

• Big projects really aren't my thing, I have much more fun creating short experiences during game jams over spending months on one single project...
• The classical advice: don't underestimate the time it will take to finish your game! What was planned as just a month or two of work ended up stretching during over a year
• Playtest with many different people: I thought I was "covered" since I had my friends playtesting the game (and they were very helpful, many bugs were caught thanks to them!), but as I found out, experiences vary wildly for different people
• Sometimes, if something hasn't really been done before, there's a good reason for that: the two dashes system I had going was redundant and not fun for players, and removing it was the right call even if it was hard to scrap something that's been in the game for a while
• Sometimes you just have to push through the burnout and put in the necessary work, even if you don't feel like doing it. On the other hand, taking breaks is important.

That's it everyone, thanks very much for reading all my ramblings! I hope you enjoyed and maybe learned something! If you want to, buying my game would make me happy, but don't feel obliged to - I don't really need to earn money from this game and certainly don't expect it to be a big success, it was more of a personal goal/achievement matter! See you all in the next big project game jam ;)