How Incomplete Is It? Informal Postmortem

The current version of Magefight that I've submitted for the K-W Month Long Game Jam 2024 is in a state that I'd call... barely functional. It's playable but hasn't really been tested in a good way and is missing a lot of fundamental features. It also has basically zero polish. The project has been a lot of fun but tacking both multiplayer networking and deformable terrain in a single project was a tall order even assuming no major difficulties _{(spoiler: there were)}

Instead of doing a formal postmortem I figured I'd just throw together a list of some of the things I wanted to get done but couldn't due to everything taking longer than expected.

Features that I wanted:

• Choice of skins for player characters
• At least one more type of mob
• Have the bees movement be less robotic
• Have bees follow other nearby bees
• Player castles existing
• Player castles able to collect mana
• Player castles able to be damaged, disgorging mana
• Explosion effects when fireballs hit things
• Textures for the ground
• Multiple different ground materials
• Earthstrike is supposed to spawn a big (damaging) spike instead of a little ball of dirt
• Sound effects for everything
• Music
• Graceful handling of players quitting
• Game win condition and return to lobby
• Pause/quit menu
• Actual visual design for the status bar
• At least one more offensive or utility spell
• A spell for repairing the castle
• Some proper handling of the world boundaries (looping or a wall or something)
• Visual effects for mob deaths

Some quality of life stuff I didn't get around to doing

• Have ENTER key submit chat in the lobby screen
• Allow in-game chat
• Make player's aim direction clearer
• Retry connections if dropped suddenly

And, of course the bug fixes that I didn't do

• Have fire spell consistently damage terrain on hit
• Stop Shock effect from jumping around when it hits stuff
• Fix artifacts where terrain chunks meet
• Make Greed spell less janky overall