Sanguinite Postmortem
I feel kind of silly doing a postemortem as if my game warranted one, but I find others quite interesting, so what the heck. It's also quite cathartic.
This is my 3rd Ludum Dare, and I think it's safe to say that I have been steadily improving. I am quite happy with how my game turned out and very happy with the ranking results. My workflow has improved dramatically. However, there is still room for a lot of improvement, and there are several key things that could have gone better.
Initial Design and the Theme
Although I've been able to manage scope reasonably well, most of my entries so far have not exactly nailed the theme as squarely as I would have liked. I think the problem is two fold:
Firstly, I have a lot of game ideas in my head that I want to use, and there's the temptation to shoehorn the theme into an already existing idea.
Secondly, I tend to get experimental with my game design which can cause the design to veer away from a central theme.
Although my designs haven't disastrously missed the mark so far, I'd like to focus more on the theme in the future and use it as a launchpad instead of an inconvenience.
Procedural Levels
I really enjoy learning about and implementing procedural generation. I also haven't dabbled a lot in manual level design, and I find it tedious. As a result, I tend to try to find a way to offload level design to procedural generation. This is good in some cases, but ends up being more work with a lower quality result in a lot of other cases.
I had already made a few prototypes beforehand for a similar cave-structure procedural level design, and so using that code as reference I was able to build a decent level generator during the jam. However it still took a huge chunk of my time and had me messing with all sorts of weird corner cases later on. There's no way I could have done this without previous experience. The whole story on the headaches of the procedural algorithms could warrant a postmortem all to itself.
While it is cool that the levels are procedural, the quality was just hit-or-miss (with odd stuff happening sometimes like items spawning right on the landing zone).
Most importantly, most players didn't seem to notice it was procedural.
Hand-crafted levels would have fit better with this project, at least for the game jam.
Game Balance
This goes hand-in-hand with procedural level generation. I got incredibly mixed feedback on game balance. Some people praised how the difficulty ramped up and how it always "felt fair". Others complained that either the whole game was too easy or that they hit a difficulty spike.
The simple explanation is that enemy spawning was semi-randomized, designed to get more intense as the danger level increased, but still unpredictable. The problem is that some levels just happened to have more difficult layouts than others due to the procedural level generator, and sometimes harder enemies spawned multiple times or enemies spawned faster just out of bad luck. On top of all that, the upgrades were all random and even the number of upgrades in each level wasn't consistent (and not all the upgrades were created equal).
Because of all of this layered randomness, players would have drastically different experiences with the game. And like I said before, I'm not sure that many of the players realized the levels were procedural at all, so they saw all of this wonkiness as hand-crafted.
Lesson learned: don't leave your game balance up to chance (unless you are designing something sadistic like NetHack). Use random elements wisely and keep control over your game.
Music
All three of my entries so far have had original composed music, but this was the first time I used Bosca Ceoil and tried to make a rich score (eh, as rich as it could be in the allotted time). I have a strong belief that audio is mandatory for all games because it adds so much to the experience.
I wanted to get a working feature-complete prototype done by Saturday night so that I could compose music and make sound effects on Sunday. That plan actually worked out pretty well, and I was pretty happy with the results.
I had issues finding the right voices in Bosca Ceoil and just using the application in general. The chiptune percussion was especially weird, and the cymbal crashes sounded very messed up over twitch which was unfortunate. Next time I'd like to have done more poking around with importing better voices to use in Bosca Ceoil, and I'd definitely like to be able to do some warm-up before the next game jam.
Audio/Visual Feedback
I got some feedback on this and it's definitely something I need to address in most of my games. I need to work on making my games more "gamey". The noise and visuals that occur when you land a hit on an enemy were too subtle.
I thought it would look cool and somewhat "realistic" if particles flew away from an enemy when it got struck by a bullet as if bits of it were getting blasted off. While it does look neat, it gets lost in the chaos when there's a lot going on in the game. The audio for a bullet hit was not very impactful as well.
Some people suggested that the enemies should flash a solid color or flicker. Those were good suggestions and I will try to take them to heart next time.
Story
I got really mixed feedback for the story. Some people loved that the story even existed, others complained it wasn't complex enough or that the ending felt bad. I can understand the complaints; the story feels like it's going in an interesting direction but then cuts off before much of a payoff.
Honestly the story was written as I built the game, and not a lot of forethought was put into it. I didn't think people would pay much attention to it, so I didn't put a ton of effort into it.
Lesson learned: people like stories. Next time I'm hoping to set time aside for story design and integrate it more into the gameplay.
The Results
Like I said earlier, I'm extremely happy with the results. I never thought I'd place so high, I couldn't have asked for more.
I was not surprised by two of my weaker categories, graphics and theme. I have never been much of an artist and usually go with the NES look to sort of mask it, and not everyone likes that look. And as I said earlier, I didn't nail the theme down as much as I could have.
I am a bit surprised at the low innovation score. I thought my game was off the beaten path and dabbled in new ideas. That being said, though, even my low scores were higher than I expected, so I'm not complaining!
I'd like to thank everyone that played my game and gave feedback. I had so much fun with this project and experiencing so much creativity while playing other games. Until next time!