Dr. Cricklash or: How I learned to stop worrying and splice DNA! was my entry into the Godot WildJam #77 It was made in the span of about 5 days and was actually a kind of spur of the moment decision to get involved.

I wasn’t expecting too much from the results, I just knew I wanted to get into doing more game jams to get me to do more projects in shorter times. I ended up coming 37th overall out of the 167 entries, which I’m honestly really happy with, I wasn’t expecting to get rated so highly. I’m even more speechless of some of my individual rated catagories.

I managed to come 20th for Fun, 8th for Origionality, and I took 1st place for the Theme. I’m absolutely astounded at these results. This is the first time I’ve participated in a gamejam where you actually get graded results voted on at the end and I managed to come 1st in one of the catagories, the Theme no less! I’m trying not to let ego get to me, but I need to look at this as some kind of confirmation of my self-improvement.

Anyway, what is there to say about the game itself? I actually do think the concept is pretty fun, and i’d like to of expanded on it some more. It was origionally going to have about 48 different animals, but I had to cut it down to about 20. It was also going to have an online leaderboard thanks to good ol' SilentWolf. Thing is, i definitly saw early on that these ideas were too big, and they got cut. Lessons learnt in the past about scope.

I also wanted to do something a bit more complicated with the graphics, I wanted to add a shader to each creature to check for each pixel that was a certain colour and apply different effects based on the creatures stats. Heck, I could of also done with prettying up some of the displayed information for when playing the game, a lot of the creature details are in the main menu and barely in game.

Truth be told, if I didn’t just join as a spur of the moment idea and actually planned to use the whole 9 days of the jam rather than just 5, I definitly could of added more polish to it, and put in the cut content, fixed the AI bugs. Next time I go for the WildJam, I’ll try to maximise my entire time.

Working on this really makes me want to do another Turn Based Strategy or maybe a puzzle sort of game, getting the framework down for this felt more complicated than my previous big game, Thicker Than Water but it was all the more exciting. I guess lower level architecture type bits is where my brain likes to scratch it’s itches, I’ve always kinda known that.