Wow, I see that my post-mortem was featured! Thank you to whoever arranged that!

Thank you everyone,  This has been another great year for the WoA.   I'm quite happy to see how well it's turned out for the past several years, and I think we've made some great strides in improving it over the years.  The amount of work you all do is tremendous, and seeing your ideas and games come together throughout the week is very cool to see.

This year however is going to be the last year that I take up the mantle for organizing and running it.   I'm hopeful someone will be up to taking up the mantle for next year,  @khawk Has plans to bring the contest and gamejam parts of gd.net online later this year, so ideally it should make future contests a bit easier to run .  I thank you all for helping make the week into what it is, And i wish good luck to whomever wishes to continue the week of awesome.

On 2017/09/03 at 6:40 PM, slicer4ever said:

This year however is going to be the last year that I take up the mantle for organizing and running it.

Ah, I'm sorry to read it! Still, fair enough, and thank you for all of your work during the Weeks of Awesome thus far!

I do hope that it is taken up by someone next year--perhaps it will be integrated as an official GameDev.net competition?

Well I enjoyed this immensely, although I still haven't managed to review a single one of the other games yet. I've liked what I've seen so far, though! I guess it's a good thing I wasn't a judge.

I was really pleasantly surprised by the response to my game. It wasn't a great fit for this contest, since it was much more about style than gameplay in the traditional sense, but I feel like it was judged based on its own merits. Even with some major pacing issues, I feel like people still manged to actually engage with it.

I wish I'd had a chance to playtest a bit more, since I probably would have realized that going back upstairs after finding the floating orbs was not at all an obvious choice. I also noticed that it's a bit too easy to step into the final trigger zone while pointed away from the window, thus missing the ending. There are some pretty obvious things I could have done to avoid this had I discovered it a bit earlier.

The idea for the aliens actually came from modeling the scroll ornaments on the columns. I thought "hmm, this looks sort of like some weird alien face," remembered that aliens were in fact part of the contest theme, and just rolled with it. I'd have liked to incorporate the scroll pattern into the actual alien design, but I didn't quite get to that in time. I've already added a lot of detail and polish to the floating spheres and secret staircase area, but I think this whole baroque + alien aesthetic might actually work if I can get it to gel together with a bit more nuance.

It's been a few years since I've actually made a serious attempt at a game jam, and even longer since I've attempted a solo entry, so I'm definitely trying to polish and expand my game into something longer and less broken. The two biggest things I'd like to add are some more involved gameplay with the alien, including possibly some kind of chase sequence, plus actually getting to meet the king. If this works out I might try to have it tested more thoroughly and release it as some kind of donationware. 

Also, my castle looks a lot like the Cuban embassy for some reason? Especially now that I've gotten around to polishing it up a bit more.