Game Jam Postmortem

Cloud Keeper was one of the simpler ideas I had for this game jam. After having taken a break, I wanted to get back into game dev and not burn myself out, and that turned out to be a success. Although I still ended up cutting down on scope, I was able to finish the game and the pixel art turned out better than I had expected.

However, I spent too much time on the "juice" and could have kept things simpler, like the settings menu or the camera panning down from the start screen. I even tried adding controller support but it didn't work very well. Although the core game mechanic and game loop were implemented early, I didn't get around to expanding on them as originally planned.

If I have time, I may make a post-jam update and add some of those features to make the gameplay more interesting.

Potential post-jam features:

• Power-ups - pay at the shrine to get additional power-ups
  • Dash ability - maybe a form of wind ability
  • Larger cloud size
  • Longer cloud lifetime
  • Spawn 2 clouds at a time
  • Faster energy recharge
  • Increased max energy
  • Alternative wind directions
• Enemies
  • Larger flame spirit that spawns smaller ones
  • Jug spirit that must fill with water to defeat
  • Wind spirit that can also move clouds
  • Potion thief
• More background sprites - trees, boulders
• More playable characters?