Post-jam retrospective (and update)

Hello person reading this!

I wanted to make a post to wrap up the GMTK 2022 jam for myself. Important lessons were learned (as always).
Bundled with this post comes a new update, changelog is at the end!

So back in my early childhood, we used to own one of these Yahtzee handhelds. Me and my family would play on it a lot back then, with our mom's score proving unbeatable. Now flash-forward at least a decade later to the start of the GMTK jam, i really wanted to put a twist on a classic game. Mainly because i wanted to make a game in PICO-8, which i hadn't touched in at least a year. Yahtzee sprung up in my mind as a simple yet fun option pretty immediately. The further ideas of including items that have unique abilities was most definitely inspired by having played a lot of Luck be a Landlord in the month before.

It didn't take me long to get to work after getting this concept down, but i had made a fatal flaw without realizing it. I was adapting a game that already exists... without looking at the source material. I was making this game off of 10+ years old memories and the wikipedia page for Yacht. I somehow managed to forget that you can actually choose to hold your dice for up to 3 rolls. The game was now just straight up pure randomness. There is some strategy that comes with the items, but it was missing the core appeal of Yahtzee.

I still enjoyed the experience of making this game though, it taught me that i should use Lua more (i have been pretty much exclusively making things in C#). In the end it seems that most people enjoyed the game (or at least the art) for what it was. Alongside the praise i also saw a number of people being confused about how to play, and i honestly don't have an answer to this yet. Yahtzee to me is something you play for a bit and then suddenly just get (which some of the comments seem to support).

 I also spent a little more effort this time around in making some cover art. Every single one of my self-published games so far had followed the format of taking some screenshots/assets, slapping some text on and calling it a day. I'd like to believe that making something more custom had an effect on players coming in, but who knows.

I feel like i've said what i wanted to so i'm going to wrap things up with the changelog for V1.1:

• Added dice locking and multiple rolls
• Added "Clairvoyance" item (Gain an extra roll, lose the ability to see helpful information)
• Replaced "The Fine Game of Nil" with a better item
• Made "PI" a little less powerful
• Minor fixes to evaluation

Happy Jauting!