Postmortem

My first published game! By far from perfect, but I'm glad it exists.

If you didn't catch it, this was a submission for Monkey Jam 2023, a jam for CDawgVA. As such, I wanted to make a game that captures his craft in some way, while relating to the "monke" theme of the jam. The idea of a monkey doing human voice acting struck and I figured a way to implement it.

The good first: So, I enjoyed how my draw turned out. The sketchy sound-room background also did a good job at not making it visually busy. The voices I managed to squeak out of my mouth on the first take (though it definitely needed more refinement). Also, the game system worked most of the time!

What I realized soon after release, though, was the controls were insufferable. And in retrospect I should have done a simple tutorial. I thought the itch.io page could bear that responsibility, but that is hidden on the jam web page!

So, what had happened was I had designed for it to be playable on phone, a fruitless effort since the current version of Godot does not export to HTML/Web very well. The giant buttons for the consonants were not necessary at all, and it did not help that I made the consonants B, D, Q, and P look like b, d, q, and p to be cute, which just confused a lot of people into thinking they're musical notes.

If I were to try again, maybe I could map the consonants and vowels on a keyboard-grid, and I would use modifier keys for the emphasis. I may explore this idea again later. It could be fun talking to others like this, rather than for a scoring system.