Volcano Hourglass Postmortem

Volcano Hourglass was created for  Micro Jam 013, a game jam that takes place over 48 hours. The jam had a couple requirements. The first requirement was the theme needed to be lava themed. The second was hidden prerequisite that would be reveled at the start of the jam. Once the jam started the prerequisite was reveled and it contained the short phrase "Time is running out". After watching a few hourglasses I saw that when the sand falls in the hourglass it creates a simple dome feature, very similar to a volcano. This  connection was perfect so I took the idea and ran with it. The game play would now have to fit around the the concept of an hourglass creating a volcano. I drew up mock designs in aesprite in order to visualize what the level could and would look like.  Below is the mock up of the game.

The hourglass was originally designed to have lava starting at he top of the glass where the sand would be and lava would drop down to the ground gradually creating a volcano that would erupt once the last bit of lava had fell from the top. I played around with the idea of the player needing to dodge the lava falling from the top, but opted to change it to sand for reasons I'm not sure of as of right now.

I ran into a few issues that I would normally sit down and spend a good amount of time finding the perfect fix and understanding exactly what went wrong. But the game jam was about performance and delivering a finished product, not getting lost in the technical details and making a stellar architecture that can't be played. This lesson is going to be a hard one for me to learn, I hope I can reach a balance of being technically sound and being able to produce games in a time effective manner. I believe with proper reflection and concise decisions a balance can be struck.
I worked on the art, especially the volcano, for quite a bit and in so it seems the controls of the game suffered as well as the gameplay in general because of it. Going into the future I think the way I execute making the game should be planned differently.

Heartbeast has a short video on a design process he believes is very good for actually seeing a game from start to finish. I'll be testing this process in the future.