Time for a few loose thoughts to wrap this up.

There are always things I wish I’d done better or managed to get in. I did talk about this a bit in the first section and I think it makes sense to come back around to it in the end, after going through the whole process from beginning to end.

The big thing that I’m not sure about is the general approach of making an initially well-presented game that’s tedious to play. I don’t regret it exactly, I’m just not sure if it was the right approach. It’s always hard to balanced the bad and the good to make “so bad it’s good” gameplay. I lean toward the interpretation that it needs to be fun even if it’s “bad”, and there are parts of RiftBreak that aren’t very fun. The buckets quest in the RPG segment is unnecessarily tedious and doubly so if you actually do it properly, and the FPS level is just annoying.

One thing I wish I could have done better is the general quality of life for players. Usually I’m pretty good about this- perhaps the biggest benefit of CommonCore is that I get config, menus, pause and all that sort of stuff right out of the box. Even save/load isn’t much work to implement. This time around, I put that explicitly out of scope because it would have been so complex to implement, and I actually disabled a lot of the stuff that was in Katana, RPG Maker MV, and CommonCore because it wouldn’t work together. It is a jam game and it’s acceptable for that, but I like to do better in this area.

Of course that are tons of little things here and there that I wish I’d added or done differently. There’s always a battle between the perfectionist and the “worth doing badly/perfection is the enemy of good enough” within me.

I also forgot that Sound was a rating category and kind of neglected it in this game. The music and sound effects are okay, but with a few exceptions I didn’t really try to make the game sound “so bad it’s good”. I think the only reason I got the rating I did in that category is because of the ending song.

I find it’s easy to get bogged down in the what wasn’t and forget about what is. A lot of things in this project did work out well. The FPS section is tedious and broken, but has a solid shooter feel. I was able to get a lot of easter eggs into the game. It’s actually pretty entertaining and funny, especially the RPG part which has a lot of interactions and a high density of jokes. Some of the cutscenes and even gameplay sections actually look really good. The main menu is the nicest UI I’ve made to date. And the fact that the whole thing worked at all is something to celebrate considering I went in only about 90% sure it would work.

It was never really practical to even try to build RiftBreak cross-platform, as I’ve mentioned earlier. Getting it to work in one environment was difficult enough! I knew I’d be shrinking my potential player base going in, I chose to accept that, and I was pleasantly surprised by the number of people who did play RiftBreak.

I would like to support multiple platforms. I want as many people as possible to be able to play my games- I mean, who doesn’t?- but it’s not a free action even if you’re using an engine like Unity which can build to multiple platforms. There are always subtle differences to account for, and more platform means more testing. Usually I put out Mac and Linux builds of my games on an experimental, as-is basis. Often they are broken- Shattered on Linux didn’t save games and ever Mac build I put out for at least half a year was broken.

I know browser playable games are popular, but I actually don’t like them as a player and only a little more as a developer. I’ve found that they tend to run worse than native executables, are often finicky with fullscreen mode and input, and can’t be easily archived (please consider offering a downloadable version for data hoarders like me). I’m primarily a Unity developer, and Unity WebGL has some annoying limitations and incredibly long build times.

However, the data is clear on this: in general people prefer browser playable games. In SBIG Jam 2020, browser playable games got more plays and more votes. There’s definitely a lower barrier to entry as you can just open the page and play the game, it can be shared with just a link, it works on most platforms by default, and it’s most likely going to run without problems without specific testing or porting work.

We’ll see about the next one.

I’ve gotten lucky every year with the timing of SBIG Jam; it’s always landed in a good spot where I’ve had plenty of time to work on my entry without real life getting in the way. I don’t expect that streak to hold for a fifth year in a row. I’m going to try to do SBIG Jam 2021 when that comes around but I may end up doing something a lot smaller and simpler- which might be a good thing to try since I typically lean towards hugely complicated projects.

I also had plenty of time to give every submission a try. There were a ton of entries this year, and I did rush some of them, but I kept my promise of playing, rating, and commenting on every game. Seeing what other people have come up with is my favourite part of game jams, and like every year there were some really neat, creative, unexpected entries this year.

Finally, I know I’ve done this before, but I’d like to thank Ned Reid (Znedd1) for running So Bad It’s Good Jam for the fourth year in a row, along with itch.io for providing the platform, and everyone who participated in the jam, whether they were able to submit in the end or not, and those who rated and commented on all the games. All of you make this jam what it is.

What’s next for me? I’m actually planning to take a break from game development for a bit. I’ve done a lot of jams lately and have been working on other stuff a lot so I’d like to step away and maybe do some drawings or something instead. After that I’ll probably get back to work on Ascension III, time permitting, although a few other projects are also possible.