Alakajam 21 (2025) post submission devlog

Damn.. that was tiring..
I think I budgeted my time pretty well, took 18 hours to get where we are now, but Im very proud of the end result
I originally wanted to introduce simple ship upgrades and put it off as the absolutely last thing and sadly that was quite out of scope, didnt even manage to add a Pause Menu😭
There's also some minor hick-ups like the Battery Packs having disabled collisions as they were acting a little off before and I didnt manage to fix that nor bring them back, there is no highscore saving, the Dash has no sound as well
I am planning to fix those things and add QoL in a post-jam update in 2 weeks

This was a very fun and productive Jam and Im glad I came back to game jams (thanks to this video), as its pretty hard for me to commit and finish a project properly and I have too many ideas where I cant lock in on making a good design.
And also finally made a finished Godot game (as Ive been playing around in the engine for like above a year now), and damn Godot is such a breeze to work with, I love it, with Unity I would've had to recompile each time waiting like 20 seconds (on a decently beefy PC mind you), and everything would be so clunky, and Ive got enough of it in my dayjob; while Godot is so fucking straight-forward and I actually fw the node-based approach, its so easy to differentiate stuff and get into the Component-based approach (for some weird reason maybe some people use Components properly in Unity where they split stuff, I never did that properly lol)

Im also thankful my younger brother is a goated music producer and made me a good looping track for the game as I still haven't gotten around to learning music even tho I really want to. He also has helped me quite a bit with brainstorming for the game

I also talked after the jam with my friend and he gave me some good feedback to probably replace the dash with an ability to completely stop (which I was initially kinda considering), removing / upping the limit of your inventory? (because the player is getting punished for being ambitious rn), and probably removing the timer as it serves no purpose

Some progress photos from during the Jam: