Postmortem

A few weeks back (in february 2025) I had the idea of a sports (specifically soccer) themed deckbuilder, because I thought it was funny and, at least to my knowledge, it hadn't been attempted before. So when I hear about the 7DRL jam I was excited because a deckbuilder is almost the same as a roguelike, right?

I started on friday evening, which in hindsight was a mistake. Had I started on saturday, I would have had a full day more (the next saturday) until my game was due and I could have at least submitted a playable game. A buggy mess of a playable game, but a playable game nonetheless.

When I didn't finish on friday, I thought that's okay, I just finish it with more time, upload it whenever and don't enter it into the jam. On Saturday (8th of march), I finished the enemy AI prototype around 4pm and I finally got to play a few rounds and... it just wasn't fun. In one moment, all my excitement was gone.

What sounded like a fun idea on paper was slow and painful to play in reality.

The lessons I learned are:

1. concentrate  on an MVP. I dallied around with things I thought could be fun instead of concentrating on gameplay

2. know your tools. I used rust and bevy and while I have used rust and bevy for the last two and a half years, I hadn't used them for a few months, so I was a little... rusty (pun intended). What began as a breezy experience ended in an architectural nightmare I couldn't recover from quick enough.

3. set more time aside. Seven days is not as crunchy as 48h or 72h, but it's still a short timeframe (in the bevy jam we usually have 10 days :P). I could have taken some days off, which might have mitigated some of my problems.

4. plan ahead if allowed. Some gamejams announce a theme or a topic which should be incorportated into the game, some jams have the constraint that everything (idea, warts and all) have to developed within the time frame, but the 7DRL jam encourages you to do planning ahead, which I did not. I had a loose idea in my mind, stepped on the gas and drove off in the woods

Since saturday, I've removed all my code from my repository and I'm reimplementing it in another architecture which I'm vastly more happy with it. When I'm at the same stage as before, I will try a few things to find the fun in my game and if I succeed, I might post it yet.