Happy New Year!

The Adequate Shepherd was not very good, but not for interesting reasons. I just got stuck finding a stupid bug in collision detection caused by a stupid off-by-one error. Then I ran out of time, decided to add on another day, and added a rudimentary goal system to the bare bones mechanics on Monday evening, and uploaded what I had as a jam entry.

I am quite happy with my pixel art though.

The Adequate Shepherd has finnicky controls, stubborn sheep, and no interesting gameplay loops on top of the core mechanic with bad game feel. Sheep have constant speed and a randomly shifting direction angle. Sheep don't have good flocking or herd behaviour. There is some herd behaviour, but it is backwards: Sheep push but don't pull each other. The hitboxes on the dogs are too big. Dog path finding does not work. You can only select one dog at a time. I knew all of this when I submitted the game, but your comments really hammered the point home.

I could go back and fix the game, but I might as well start from scratch. In the best case, a fixed version could be a poor man's Stardew Valley, except with only sheep and nothing else. So I won't.

Instead, I decided to make a post-jam version of my LD35 game Shiftromino with better controls and more levels. Shiftromino could really benefit from more content.

This level will be the next version:

Maybe you will be able to rotate the tetrominos after all!

I wanted to write a post-mortem about our old game Wyst for some time. It's one of our games that deserves a post-mortem most. Based on LD32 and LD30, I have written about things that can go wrong in games in general on tumblr, and I have written a post-mortem on Mead Boy: design, drunk game feel, level design, what went wrong.

My post on Team Work for Game Jams and the third section of my post Puzzle Game Design pretty much describe our approach to Wyst team work and riddle/puzzle design. We avoided all kinds of mistakes we made in LD31 (too ambitious, too incoherent), LD32 (neat idea, more of a prototype than a game), and LD33 (main mechanic is too simple).

But instead of a post-mortem of Wyst two years later, I have decided to make this:

A developer commentary system! Click play and you hear something about this part of the game! Now I just need to get @gnihad, @fastpath, @fantasieleben, Fabian, Sven and Jonas to record something, and we could have something much cooler than a post-mortem. The exploration in Wyst is great for developer commentary, because you can stay a while and listen, without having to worry about running out of beer, wolves eating your sheep, or a marine biologist downgrading you from supernatural cryptid monster to mere aquatic animal.

Stay tuned!