This sounds useful - GameAWeek #1 Postmortem

Ok, this is my first time ever doing a devlog, so bare with me.

I saw that Jonny is making a devlog for each week of #gameaweek2022, and I think this is a cool part of the process.  

So basically I joined Game A Week a day later, because of peer preasure (I know 9 devs participating) and because it's exactly my new year's resolution: make a lot of smaller games faster, by myself. 

I saw the theme and it seemed approachable: "10 seconds of gameplay". I wanted to do something very minimalistic with an 8x8 pixels character, and something arcade-y and with fast paced action was definitely the way to go. Something that could take place on a single screen, with not a lot of level design. Thinking about constrains and the things I'm good at doing was an useful way of giving shape to an idea. 
I wanted something related with daily life, and suddenly I though "don't think about elephants!". Probably because my friend and teammate Ayu had talked to me about a game about the elephant in the room a few days before. That was all I needed, a game about dodging intrusive elephant thoughts! 

You can download the sourcecode, it's an extremely simple topdown, with a series of spawners around the screen. Every 0.7 seconds, system picks two random instances of the spawner and sends a bullet-elephant towards the player's position in that moment. Easy.

The song needed to be past paced, spin around some minor chord to make it sound kinda like a chase tune, and have a very long ending, so you could immediately tell when it was about to end, and make a slide of tension chords towards the resolution. This was so the music would go along with the feeling, but also because I didn't wanted to code a timer or a progress bar, so this way I could kill two birds with one stone, and give the player feedback of the time left with the music. Not very accesible tho, I know. Chords are: Em | G | Bm | C | D G | Em, compound time. 

I made all of that in like 2 hours, and then spent almost 2 hours more doing the two illustrations and putting a little bit of love into the itch page. I'm quite happy with how it all turned out. 

As a postmortem, I could say that a lot of people thought the whole game was just the screen saying "Don't think about--", which I thought it was quite amazing.
But also a good reminder that even experienced players/devs will forget to smash keys to start the game if not prompted to do so. Say the things you pretend players to do!! You can't expect people to read your mind.