Mikaelf Saves Christmas was made in a month for the Secret Santa Game Jam. It is my second completed jam game, and I figured with 4x the jam length as compared to my 1 week endeavor Bloom!, I could drastically expand scope.

this was not the case.

I made the entire final boss encounter, end screen, Santa's castle, and bow animation in a couple hours. I crunched the last day hard, and I learned a lot about time management and how hard it is to make an ambitious title in such a short time. I had to cut the scope and size of my game from about 20% for the final product --  I was planning on having 3 items, 2 dungeons, multiple enemy and NPC types, and none of this came to fruition. I am still proud of what was accomplished, and hope my giftee enjoyed the game!

Mikaelf is based on the name of my giftee (Mike), and the medieval setting. Mikael is a medieval-sounding name, right? I (very loosely) studied medieval architecture to draw Mikaelf's house(and also the NPC houses that are destroyed), and also made Santa a king with a castle. This ties into  the title theme being a medieval-sounding track, as well. I stuck with Christmas as a main theme too, as my Santa specifically told me he wanted swords, bows, and killing during Christmastime, and I suppose I delivered on that. He also stated he likes top-down Zelda and For Honor, so I made a top-down Zelda-esque action game with a parry mechanic to 1: spice things up, and 2:  also very loosely tie For Honor into the mish-mash of concepts.

Now, for the future of Mikaelf, I don't intend on meeting that original grand vision, however there are some bugs I'd like to squash if I have time before Christmas day.

those known bugs:

- getting hit while in text boxes causes you to get stuck on a different Z level. You shouldn't be able to get hit at all, however enemies don't go into a paused state while text boxes are active. This was an oversight that I didn't have time to fix, and generally doesn't impact gameplay on a drastic level.

- Krampus attack animation not updating properly. Again, not a game-breaking bug, but it's there.

- Not technically a bug, but need a delete button for save files. Current way to delete saves is to go to your C: drive, into users, your user, appdata, local, and the game's save folder. Obviously fine for testing, obviously not okay for final product. This, on my end, was just not prioritizing it over finishing the actual game.

I'd also like to try to take some time to flesh out the boss fight, however I am unsure how doable that is by the 25th. 

There will be a video devlog posted to my YouTube channel hopefully in the next few days discussing my experience with the game, so stay tuned for that if this project or my general process interests you!