Don't Blow It Retrospective

WARNING - THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS I GUESS? YEAH I KNOW IT'S SPOILERS FOR A 48 HOUR JAM GAME BUT THE GAME DEFINITELY HAS MORE VALUE BEING PLAYED BLIND.

This game was made in 48 hours for the GMTK Game Jam 2019. The theme was "Only One". I took that as far as I logically could and made this, a novelty game that only lets you play it once.

Don't Blow It has very little substance to it. The only actual gameplay is shooting a spinning target with a difficulty curve too harsh for a game that doesn't let you practice it. I'd love to meet someone that scored above 3 without cheating. Graphically the game is basic but not ugly I think. It consists of a single 3D model created by my friend for the gun as well as a perfectly shiny material for that gun, a skybox, a circle, and some text. The two sounds in the game leave something to be desired, and the game is narrated by some kinda rude text printed on screen which I'd probably rewrite.

But the gameplay and graphics are not what makes this game interesting. What made the game interesting is the game tries its best to only let you play the game once. Once you miss a shot, the game closes. But that isn't enough. The game proceeds to then delete the executable and pck files from your system. On Windows it creates a batch script that nukes the two files, while on Linux there's no such file locking so it just straight up deletes itself. Of course I had no doubt that at least some players would be curious enough to try running the game again by reinstalling it, so I took an extra measure, writing a parameter to the config file that the game reads on startup to tell if you've played the game before. That's as far as I went, I figured players that went that far would be impressed enough, not that there would be many. Most players were probably rushing through a rating queue and wouldn't bother chasing it further.

The anti-replay measures I put in the game feel like they're bordering on malware as it is, doing unwanted things to the player's system, but there were probably ways I could have taken the idea further. On Windows I could have had the game make registry tweaks, and overall I could have gone and deleted the zip that the game was downloaded in from the downloads folder if it was there.

The biggest inspiration for this was probably Undertale, specifically how completing a genocide run would taint your game in a way that you can't easily figure out, but also in the whole meta element of it making me want to make a game that does something similar, so I took my chance when I could. 

I'm happy overall. The game got its highest rating in the adherence to theme category at a 4.3/5, #307th in the whole jam! The worst rating was expectedly design, since there wasn't exactly much of it. The game is absolutely a gimmick and a game jam is a great chance to make a gimmick game like this, and despite the lack of any effort in the gameplay I'm happy with what I made here.