Postmortem

Ok, I think I'm gonna move on from this project for now. 

Originally, I wanted to take the jam game and go further with it, create a bunch of new levels, more animals and flavor text, etc. The thing is: I was playtesting a little bit and I realized something truly awful: the game wasn't that fun. 

Maybe I should rephrase: I don't think every game "needs" to be "fun," there are plenty of nontraditionally fun games out there that are really interesting. The problem was more that Super Sim Firefight just wasn't that engaging. I had known this from more or less as soon as I had submitted to the jam, but when I posted yesterday's update I thought I had fixed the core problem. The controls from the jam were clunky! Now they're better! The thing is: I don't really mind clunky controls that much; a little bit of jank gives a game personality. In this update, the controls are better but they're still clunky, still janky. The problem had to lie elsewhere. The game wasn't ENGAGING.

The original idea for the game that I thought of as the jam launched was "Hey, what if Dwarf Fortress but instead of, well, dwarves and fortresses you had firefighters and fire?" Trying to mimic DF as a newbie dev with a 48 hour deadline was.... ambitious (read: stupid), but I did the best I could. However, one of the core bits of "fun" in DF is how you only give commands to the dwarves instead of controlling them directly. You say "hey, go dig a tunnel" and Brimlir Boulderfang or whatever goes off and busies himself as you manage other things. That's the whole point. Because I couldn't figure out the complex AI I wanted, here you basically just grab the firefighters and put them where you want them to be. This makes the game, in practice, not a management sim at all but just repeating one really lame fetch quest: get water, take it to fire, repeat. There's not even the fun of controlling all the different firefighters because you can only grab one at a time. 

Still, there is a cohesive idea here. I'm really proud that I got *something* done for the jam, and working on debugging post-jam has been fun too. I think I did a decent job with the game's aesthetics, and overall it was a really good learning experience. I want to keep entering jams and get better as a dev.

That means I'm probably gonna just abandon this game for now (although I might come in with an occasional bug fix). I made it, I learned, I'm gonna move on. However: I guess it's possible I might return to the "firefighter management sim" concept, but not until I have a better grasp on coding. If that day comes, Super Sim Firefight 2 will be much closer to the original idea, with "commanding" firefighters instead of just grabbing them. Maybe there'll even be random generation (another concept that I had to cut early on). 

Anyway, if you checked this game out, thank you for playing! Hopefully I'll see you around on my next project :) .