Traz Logo is a silly little game I made for the LD Jam #53 compo. In other words, it's a small game I made solo under 48 hours. That's a really tiny window! Enough to make a catchy YouTube thumbnail. On it, you play as a delivery drone with a claw to drag stuff around. That's it!

Also, the game name roughly translates to "bring this ASAP", in case you are wondering.

 Anyway, a bunch of other people accepted this same challenge, and for this edition we had about 500 compo games. Here's the results for Traz Logo:

 So, I got top 100 in everything, and also top 20 on really cool categories! I'm really happy with the results.

 Still, looking back, I could've done things better. Well, that's the point of writing a postmortem.  To keep things brief, I'll use a bullet list to sort what went right or wrong, along with other comments. Also, in case I sound like I am bragging about how well the game did, that's not the intent: I might use the results as a way to validate what I thought, but I'm not a master game developer or anything like that! Far from it.

• Things that worked!
  • Outlined sprites
    They helped give the game a cartoony look.
    IMO it's almost like cheating... it helps the pixel art have a bit more "oomph"in my opinion, and is really easy to do.
    It seems this worked, since Traz Logo almost got into the Top 10 in the art category!
  • Having reference while making the music
    I'm no composer. If I'm still learning game development stuff and there's a looooot to learn, you can say that 10x about me and making music. Under such a small time frame, I looked at the New Wave Boss Nova from Majora's Mask music sheet, and that helped me kickstart some ideas for the drums and the melody, which are parts I struggle more than usual.
  • Using Godot's RigidBody2D stuff
    Usually, for me, working with KinematicBodies2D is the way to go, since I have a better control of the physics behaviour for those objects. This time, I used RigidBodies2D as well, since they helped make the physics more beliveable. Also, I didn't need to code physics stuff!
  • Having a "hook" object
    This might be the best thing. Basically, the player can ONLY interact with hooks where the claw attaches. However, this hook can be part of other RigidBodies2D: this way, adding the "grabbable" behaviour to other things was a lot easier.
    It think this is closely related to using composition in OOP programming. I should use this more often, it really helps!
    
• And things that didn't work...
  • Feature creep
    Man, for a game about carrying stuff from A to B, I sure don't know why anymore I added lasers and mirrors.
    It was good to learn a thing or two, but heck, that stuff took a GOOD amount of my dev time. I should've stopped with the lasers only, max. Adding the mirrors was my bane...
    The game could end up being short without some more mechanics, but in reality, the game did end short because I worked too much on those features, and they didn't really add a lot to the game IMO. Some spikes could've done the job just as well, and take a lot less time to implement.
  • Crunching
    While you are furiously developing your game, time might fly, but at some point you might get tired.
    What I did when that time came? Well, I took a break, yeah, but after some minutes there I was again, fixing bugs. My entire weekend was making this game.
    Using part of the weekend only might've been better... I mean, game development is a way to occupy my time (aka a hobby), but sometimes I feel like doing something else instead of solving bugs or adding features or drawing stuff. Still, the deadline more or less makes me really focus on developing the game. Being more chill on this aspect would be nice.
    Maybe, planning the features better would help with this: if I planned which features would get into the game from the start, along plans B in case things go south, I might have ended up with more free time, and a game finished sooner. I'll have to test this someday.
  • Not testing enough and not giving proper attention to certain behaviours
    There are some weird behaviours ingame. In the initial version, you could glitch objects inside the walls and they would zoom away. I knew about it, but thought it wouldn't be too bad of an issue.
    Well, it was 🙂

I'm finishing this post mortem here: I don't think there's much else to add, and I think keeping things sorta brief is good for me and also for you, dear reader. Thanks for the interest in my random ramblings :)