Sadly, we didn’t nailed it. And we are sorry.

Taking part on GBJam was awesome. However, we couldn’t achieve what we expected and planned to, for various reasons. But we had, at least, various lessons learned.

Mostly, we only could develop the game in our spare time. We tried a crunch time on the last two days and it turned out as a terrible idea.

We all were involved in courses and work. Most of the team (me included) was very busy finishing a game for our official job. Btw, it was just released! Look for Wake Woody Infinity on AppStore, Google Play and Windows Phone Store =]

So it all turned into a snowball: we had a narrow schedule to work with, we got cocky with high expectations and very complex objectives and we aimed it wrong.

We didn’t have a well defined plan, most of our decisions were “on the fly”, which is very dangerous when you are working with a very short deadline.

The last hours before our final build and submission to the GB Jam voting were when we realized that we had tested the game only on the executable file and not on the Jolt’s web player.

And that was our biggest mistake because…well, we made an online cooperative multiplayer game in which the two players were not able to interact to each other.

I mean, one of the players would always appear as an invisible character, mostly, the Bear.

Our main feature simply didn’t worked. Or, I mean, we simply didn’t tested it properly. And we had invested LOTS of work hours on it: setting servers, testing and fixing feature bugs and so on.

We aimed it worng, we didn’t made a game, we had only a feature. No context, no story, no rich gameplay or experience. Just a feature: online server on.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, they say. Some of our game’s enemies stayed only on my Tumblr gifs. We didn’t had enough time to put them in the game, sadly. And if we did so, we shouldn’t be able to test the gameplay anyway.

Besides all the frustration, we did learned 3 great lessons and we would love to share it with you:

Invest a reasonable time to test your features and gameplay. Don’t leave it to the last few hours. It is dumb. It’s a game and the gameplay is its soul.

Don’t be feature-focused. It’s a moody game, it must be funny, entertaining or, at least, have an interesting story. We ha a very rich atmosphere, the Inuit culture, in which we did invested some research on, but we just couldn’t use it the way it should.

Community is all. The best part on being part of the Jam, was the community. On Twitter (#gbjam), here on forums and via the comments on the game page and posts…all this interaction and feedback was very important for us to learn the power of this community. And, because of that, failing at this jam makes me so sad: disappointing you was very shameful for me. I just keep thinking: this awesome community deserves something better, just like many of the games that were submitted, and I failed them.

I would like to thank all the community support but mostly @UncanyValle and @HTRCarlos, the game developers who gave their blood to this game. We did our best with the max we could. And I’m not saying that our best wasn’t enought, because I had worked with those guys before and I KNOW it is. We simple just aimed wrong.

I also would like to congratulate Paulo Bohrer II for his AWESOME work with the background music and sound effects of the game. If there are any good results on Soul Link, definitively it is the MUSIC. You can listen and download it on the Music section on Soul Link’s page.

Thank you for your time and appretiation. Next time we will be more modest and work within reasonable objetcives. One week to make an online cooperative multiplayers game-boy-like game is definitively NOT ENOUGH.

Lessons learned! May the next jam comes!