With the end of June, the awesome Neo-Twiny Jam is now over. Like last year, I have a blast reading and playing everyone’s entries. If you have even five minutes to spare, take a look at the jam entries, you’ll be surprised how much can be expressed in 500 words.

And now we’re talking about the game. This might be the hardest postmortem I have to face, because A Clean Getaway has managed to be my most “successful” game on itch. It brings more comments and views than any other piece in my gallery (admittedly, the bar is really really low), and it gets an overwhelmingly positive response.

I wish I could say something clever, but truth to be told it was something I sketched in a hurry one day, half asleep, and probably also grumpy. People who know me know that I have the tendency to be overly cute and grandiose with my concepts, which often backfire in the manners you might have expected. This one has nothing like that. My most successful “game” before this was a stupid gacha simulator, which was simply a python random wrapped in an elaborate presentation, flashy ripped off sprites, and made in the name of an internal joke. It was a sore point for me that the “joke” three-day-to-hell-with-it jam work garnered more attention than pieces I labored for. So of course this one, implemented almost without change from my scratchpad in about thirty minutes before I made myself a nice breakfast, went on the same path. Honestly, I spent more time thinking of a title than putting this together.

Don’t get me wrong, I am happy people play it, and honestly it’s perhaps the “game-est” title in my current itch catalogue. Deceth helped me testplay it, and the only change I had to make from its initial “design” (if you could call it that) was the incentive to go out. At first, turtling was the best strategy. There was no point in gathering too much resource. It made the loops extremely boring, so I tweaked it and added a resource sink, so if you venture out often you would get more things to bargain with. I also changed the arrest mechanic so it would not happen in the first day and minimize the chance of it happening multiple times in a row.

It was weirdly addicting, even if I personally suck at it. I had to reread the code multiple times because I kept getting caught early and multiple times in a row even after adjustments. There was nothing wrong with the code. It was, after all, largely straightforward. Something might be wrong with my lucky stars. Ha. The message is really clear, something simple can be fun, and I should not get caught up in my navel-gazing and elaborate nonsense all the time.

When all was said and done, I had this submission ready early, leaving me with ample free time should I want to make something else for the jam. I did. And personally, I like that one better.

I do relish in the opportunity to do some fun, if dubious, UI job paying homage to one of the coolest design this side of the galaxy. Why Bebop? Well, Magic: the Gathering was having a collaboration going when I was looking for color schemes…

Maybe I should try making an idle game next year.