Some thoughts and some words

Before I made this game, I had never joined a game jam. I tend to get cold feet around the idea generally, but always wanted to change that.
The theme of friendship jam drew me in though, as friendship is very important to me. I thought it'd be fun to make a game with a very close friend, and they thought it'd be fun too. We had around a month to make a game, so we were hopeful we'd get something put together. Things kinda got too busy for them tho, and we never really got the chance. I still wanted to make something tho, so with 2 days left I came up with an idea and eventually decided on doing it in RPG Maker VXA, since I'm very familiar with RPG Maker.

This game is not that idea. That idea was a simple, abstract game about friendship's power to help you through hard times. You'd have went through abstract, confusing imagery that slowly coalesced into an understandable scene through the help of a friend. There was merit to the idea I'm sure, and I didn't ditch it for any real reason. I've always had issues of reigning myself in and not expanding the scope of a project, and this was no exception. Putting together the game, I'd experiment with how to show the idea, and slowly those experiments lead me to new ideas. I shouldn't really have done that but I did. I went from a purely abstracted world, to pieces of a world floating in a void, to what I ended up with, as a world evolved around it.

In the end I ended up with a fantasy world, with lots of unsubtle parallels and themes to it. I ended up with a story which was intended to be about the importance of friendship in an unwelcoming environment. I thought, and do still think the premise of it all could be interesting. I don't really know that I pulled it off very well in 2 days. The writing is sloppy and elements of it did not come out very well because of my lack of time to think on them. The writing only getting worse as I went on as I ended up overworking myself to get it done. I had to cut back many things I wanted to do for time constraints. I wanted to do custom art, but I didn't have time, so had to settle for extending the RTP. I wanted to do custom music, but instead I ended up grabbing tunes from RPG Maker 2003 because VXA's music is so limited. The locales you visit aren't as fleshed out as I would have liked and there's some conveyance issues I think. Kinda most importantly I'm still unsure if the friendship will read as a friendship to everyone, as I sorta portrayed a friendship how I view friendships, and didn't give appropriate context for it.

But overall I'm proud I still managed to get something made in just 2 days. I don't recommend making something like this in two days if you don't have the experience. I stressed myself out from overwork and ended up feeling completely dead for a few days afterwards. It was nice to finally put my RPG Maker experience into a finished thing, and get a little bit more experience along the way. I don't know if anyone is going to read this post, but thank you if you have.

Addendum:
I probably will return to this game at some point. I would like to remake it to fix a lot of the issues I have with it, and bring it closer to what I envisioned. I do have ideas for a couple followups as well. For now however, I am working on a couple of other projects, some small and some not so small.