Loco Lift Rush came in 5th place!!!

I'm absolutely thrilled and so grateful to all my fellow PyWeek entrants who voted for and critiqued my game, and especially to my daughter Romilly, whose gorgeous drawings were the most praised part!

I had a great time making it, and while I never dreamed it would be received so well, I had a good feeling about how it came together. Getting feedback from the other jammers is brilliant - it makes me wish there was a Pyweek every month!

Entering a game jam is a great way to push yourself to finish something, and honing those skills is one of my main goals for my one game a month challenge. So what have I learned?

Lesson 1: Getting Out of My Own Way

I really like pixel art. It makes me nostalgic for the games of my youth, and I always want to make games that look like them. But while I'm decent at drawing with pencil and paper, pixel art is a whole different skill set that I just haven't put the hours into.

So I decided from the start to avoid getting bogged down in pixels, and use hand-drawn art instead. This allowed Romilly to join in, which was so much fun for both of us, and gave the game a unique and charming look. In fact, a number of the judges commented on how much they loved the art style, and I think that was a big part of why the game did so well.

Romilly was absolutely made up by the attention her drawings got, and she's already planning our next collaboration.

I used a cheap USB drawing tablet to copy Romilly's drawings into GIMP, which made it really easy to digitize them, resize them, and load them as assets in Pygame. Doing this was quick and painless, and I'll definitely be using this approach again.

Lesson 2: Publish and Be Damned

While the praise and constructive criticism I received from the other jammers was ego-boosting and really motivating, I was mortified to discover that a couple of them couldn't run the game. I made the schoolboy error of only testing in my development environment, and not on other machines or Python versions.

The bug was that a function I used (random.normalvariate) to set how long to wait between each passenger's arrival used to have 2 mandatory parameters, but in Python 3.11 a default value was added for the second, and I only tested on Python 3.13. So anyone using Python 3.10 or earlier just got a error message saying I'd missed a parameter. Cringe.

Making mistakes teaches you a lot more than getting everything right. Even in a low-stakes environment like a game jam, the embarrassment of a show-stopping bug is a lesson I won't soon forget.

Lesson 3: There's Nothing New Under the Sun

After submitting my game, I did a quick search on itch.io to see if I had actually invented anything new. It turns out that there are already quite a few incredibly similar games out there. Unexpectedly, this was reassuring - there is clearly a fun game to be made here, and I am not the only one who has thought of it!

Here are some that I found particularly interesting:

• Elevángel (2022)
• L'ascenseur Magnifique (GMTK Game Jam 2021)
• Smooth Operator (2021)
• Ele-Gator (2020)
• Elevator Pitch (GMTK Game Jam 2019)
• Elevator Panic (LD37 2016)

Some have interesting mechanics that I wish I'd thought of. For example, L'ascenseur Magnifique makes the lift ascend slower with more passengers but descend faster - a neat trade-off that makes the game more strategic.

Seeing other people's takes on the same idea is fascinating and has given me more ideas for how to improve Loco Lift Rush.

Lesson 4: Horse Trading

A game jam (and perhaps all game dev) is an exercise in ruthless trade-offs. I'd failed to learn this in previous attempts, but this time it finally clicked.

I deliberately started with greyboxing (using simple boxes to represent the lift and passengers) to get the game mechanics working first, and scheduled the art for later in the week. As a result, I avoided getting distracted drawing pixel art and was able to get a playable version done by the end of the second day, which really boosted my confidence!

But I had to cut a lot of features that I wanted, like different passenger types, power-ups, and a continuously growing building. I didn't have enough time to make animations and music, or to fine-tune the pacing of the game or give it a definitive ending.

What Next?

I have a long list of ideas for improvements and new features...

But I am out of time for month 2 of my one game a month challenge!

Rule #1 is One Game a Month (and only one game at a time!) so I have to set Loco Lift Rush aside for now. It's tough to walk away with so many exciting ideas, but I will definitely be coming back to it - watch this space!