Hello! I am @lemail-music , and here's a retrospective on Bird's Watch.

First, I'll start with a few positives. The game looks great and has really nicely modeled assets courtesy of @JustWladNothingElse , and @blat . I also like the calibration minigame and a lot of the sound design (though I might be slightly biased). That's about all though .

The Bird's Watch was made in days, which only 3 of were actually spent on coding.

Our time management was frankly awful. We were too self critical of little things such as camera shake (which we tweaked for probably 2 hours (@blat ). And while this would have been fine for any other time, we were in a game jam, which wasn't exactly the time for perfection. Only coding for 3 days was also a really bad idea, which was admittedly due to my arrogance and not believing we'd actually get the game done due to past experiences.

I must remind you, that development hell in the fnaf community is very much a real thing. Teams stranded for years not having direction. We'd know. We were like that for 2 years!

But what did we miss in the mess that was this development process (if you can call it that)? Here's a few things. Unreal Engine 5. Unreal Engine contains maybe the heaviest commercial real-time lighting engine in any game engine. It resulted in a lot of players being unable to play the game due to performance issues. It also made it so our instructions were hidden from a lot of players due to me not having time to program asynchronous level loading, making it so the level loaded after the ui instructions had already been loaded and then deleted. The game's visual indications were also lacking in a lot of other regards. No power info for the player, though this was a deliberate decision, which ended up being way too unforgiving. No way of knowing what to do except for a shotty briefing and a sentence of explanation. The whole game seemed like it was fighting against you. Really we just needed a simple visual tutorial or walkthrough of the features.

The mission design is okay. Fetch quests, and a small puzzle are very normal for the genre. Though fetch quests might be boring, they're simple to understand and help with understanding the core mechanics of the enemy at hand. The calibrator was a problem for a few people and I realize later that you couldn't really do it if you're pitch deaf and maybe we could have also had a visual indicator, but it also would've made the puzzle a lot easier. Balance is difficult and pretty much everything has draw backs, if it isn't boring. The animatronic though visually appealing, wasn't polished nearly enough codingwise. It also wasn't explained.

In summary, manage your time better, things that seem obvious to you are pretty much never obvious to the player, explain, explain, explain, don't use unreal 5 for a game jam unless you actively want to torture yourself, visuals < gameplay and most importantly learn from your mistakes.