For GMTK 2023 the theme was Roles Reversed.  My submission for this jam was Grim Gateau. In this game you play as the boss rather then the hero like you typically would. Although the core idea for the project was the same it changed a lot during development and in my opinion it changed for the worse. 

Very quickly I came up with my idea. A roguelike game but with gameplay like Cuphead but you play as the boss. You would control the boss and kill as many players as you could progressing through the run, each boss player kill would afford you 1 currency for permanent upgrades to be spent between runs. It would also afford you a random perk which you could choose between 3. You would face 3-4 waves of weaker players before a boss player which would be way more difficult. After dying you would get to spend the currency accumulated to unlock new random perks, permanent upgrades such as boosts to health or ways to heal. 

As you can tell the final product is nothing like the original concept. This was all due to time. I spent all of the first 24 hours of the jam struggling to program the player AI. The result of this time was a half working very buggy AI that would take far too long to get working and would likely not be completed in time for the jam. Then I switched to the current gameplay style of the game. The perk system was also scrapped as by the time the basic prototype was completed without that feature it was already past the 30 hour mark, due to this a much simpler version of it was added. The remainder of the time was spent on art, music, sfx, polish and finishing the game.

This game is my worst game so far out of my two jam games and Eris and the fading kingdom. I spent far too long on a mechanic and should have scrapped it earlier on so that more time could have been spent making a better final game.  I am a fan of how the cake and the pumpkin enemy turned out but that is all. 

Overall my big take away from this jam is to spend less time on something before scrapping it in order to create a different but better game and in the next jam this will be taken into careful consideration.