Improvement notes

I made this escape game for Lost Relic Jam for the theme connection. Progress was going good through most of development, though I lost a couple days before the end and ran into a bunch of last minute hitches. While I ended up with a game that could be played from beginning to end, by the time I had the game breaking bugs fixed, I had missed submitting by two minutes :(

I was frustrated at first, but decided it was probably for the best, since there were still a lot of jarring issues, like the fire appearing before it was supposed to. I ended up fixing some of them, but when I returned to working on it for Improve My Game Jam, I found even more :\

My initial improvement plans were to fix the remaining bugs, finish the inventory so that every item appeared when picked up and became transparent after use, and to give the 3 pieces of metal's inventory image a number that increases for each piece found. I also had some more ambitious goals I dropped and made several improvements I had not thought of until I started the jam. 

For example, originally the fire would not start with just the log and magnifying glass -- you had to have the grappling hook items too. I decided it would be better to allow the user to start the fire if they had the log and magnifying glass, then click a second time to make the grappling hook when they had all the necessary items. Another factor I felt needed improving was making some of the items a little harder to get, so I hid two of the three pieces of metal. One under a rock and another in a location that would require another item, the hammer, to reach it. I really feel this made the game more challenging since not everything was in the open to be clicked as soon as it was seen and some areas had to be explored multiple times to get results.

One aspect of the game that I do not expect I will ever be able to improve is the lighthouse. It was quite hard finding non-personal use lighthouse images, let alone one that came with a nice scenic background that fit the rest of the game's backgrounds, which were all random Itch assests. In the end, I found a lighthouse outline PNG, colored it and pasted it in an image of an open field. I do not mind the full image too much, but the close up looks like an up-side-down cotton candy cone XD. 

Other than that, I am satisfied with my final game.