Hexeye Defender - Game Jam - PostMortem

Here is an 18min. video of my process and post mortem of my Buildbox Game Jam submission - Hexeye Defender

This is a post-mortem of Hexeye Defender, the game Jerry built for a Buildbox game jam (it placed second). Rather than a step-by-step build, it walks through the design process from idea to polish. Below are the key takeaways for anyone running their own jam.

Timebox the ideation

After the theme dropped, Jerry gave himself a strict one hour to brainstorm on whiteboards, sketching concepts, writing mechanics, wiping them, and starting over. That hour narrowed many rough ideas down to two finalists: a 'space walker' navigating floating wreckage while running out of air, and a planet-defense game with a ship orbiting a central world while enemies fly in. Constraining the idea phase is what kept the rest of the jam on schedule.

Gray-box before committing

Both finalists were prototyped as gray boxes using Buildbox's built-in placeholder shapes — no art, just mechanics. Playing them back made the decision obvious: the planet-defender simply felt more fun and action-packed than the wreckage game. The lesson is to choose based on how a playable prototype feels, not how the idea sounds on paper, especially in a jam where fun is the goal.

Work from a checklist

Once the concept was locked, Jerry wrote a checklist of features: movement, a timer bar, lives, enemies with different damage levels, a boss, and UI screens (title, menu, game UI, game over, buttons). Power-ups were planned as a shield (positive), a slow effect (negative), and a laser beam (cut for time). The checklist doubled as a scope-control tool — the laser and an 'every 20 kills' trigger were dropped or simplified to fit the deadline.

Build art fast and export smart

Core graphics were made in Hexels using a hexagon motif (matching his other game, Trixel Rocket), with extra shapes done in Illustrator and assembled in Photoshop with a pixel font. A handy Photoshop tip: name a layer with a .png extension and enable Generate Image Assets, and Photoshop auto-exports that layer — re-exporting every time you update it. A late, quirky touch turned the planet into an eyeball, renaming the game Hexeye.

Polish is mostly feel and feedback

Most of the back half was tuning: fixing sluggish inertia by adjusting numbers, adding a reticle so players could see their firing direction while rotating, and enabling keyboard start/exit. Player feedback got special attention — a custom screen flash on enemy kills (a hot-pink cyberpunk overlay) and an 'Awesome!' banner that drops down the screen. That banner was hacked together by making it an enemy object with a particle effect, spawned on a timer, then destroyed at the bottom — a reminder that jam solutions can be quick and dirty as long as they read well to the player.