The game I worked is called Corruption and was submitted under a group account we made called MapleQuest (an inside joke). I’m a bit late in writing this but did want to get it out before the LD came to a close. The delay away has given me some time to reflect on it as well. We met on Reddit just a few days before the jam with the intention of entering something into LD33. It was everyone’s first jam and we were all pretty motivated to make something.

It started well, but in my opinion quickly fell apart.

We had some ideas which looking back on now may have been a bit overly ambitious. Our original intention was to take the theme of “You are the Monster” and make a game based on the concept of “Are you the Monster?”, a platformer where you would go through the game and be given the moral choice of destroying stuff around you to gain power, or ‘doing the right thing’ by leaving it be. The idea didn’t turn out to work as expected and we started re-iterating on the idea… and re-iterating… and re-iterating… throughout the whole jam. As a group we had a hard time coming to any sort of agreement on what mechanics worked, what didn’t, and what it takes to make a fun game.

The end result is something that uses the art and sound assets from our previous ideas and tries to put some new game around them. The conclusion to go with the mechanics in the final game were chosen within the last 6 hours before the deadline and the end result is an idea that isn’t really fleshed out as well as it could be. If this game has one fatal flaw, it’s that the mechanics aren’t clearly demonstrated to the player early on. There’s also a lot of new stuff happening you don’t really see happening in a platformer which means it’s not as instantly intuitive and can cause confusion:

• the aggro range of the shadow expands over time
• the shadow corrupts creatures into enemies
• killing enemies ups your corruption meter in the top right and lowers the shadow’s aggression
• if your corruption meter fills completely you get hurt

The end result is something that technically works but doesn’t really add any additional fun or strategy to the game. The systems feel more like an arbitrary constraint than something new you can use to your advantage.

I’m still quite new to game development and it’s the first platformer I made that wasn’t a quick (made in less than an hour) prototype. Something I didn’t realize before being in the designer seat (as opposed to the player seat) is how hard it is add the subtleties to a platformer that make it “feel good”. As a few of the comments mentioned, having the player move whenever they attack can be very frustrating and adds a lot of difficulty (as opposed to challenge). Having a stationary attack in addition to the dashing attack could have helped a lot. Making the attack feel a bit weightier, like slowing down the player when they collide with an enemy, and not having the enemy instantly vanish and instead recoil from the attack, would have helped a lot to make the dash not feel as wild.

The Good:

• The quantity of art assets and animations our single artist was able to put out in the small time frame was impressive.
• The sound is great. The way the sound can add so much life to a world is something I always seem to underestimate until I hear it.
• I’m happy with the particle and WebGL effects on the shadow creature and checkpoints. They’re not something I’d really implemented much before and worked out better than expected.
• The incredibly amount of work the three of us did in the last 6 hours before the deadline. Once the mechanics were set in stone and we had all committed to them, it seemed like everyone got into this hyper-productive zen like state and just started pumping out work fast.
• The level’s flow. There wasn’t a lot of time to get others to playtest the level. For a first go at things I think it flows well and does a good job of making the direction you need to go clear without too many markers. I think the checkpoints are spaced out well between the action (for the most part) to make a decent rhythm, with high and low points.

The Bad:

• Too complicated an idea to start, and too much wasted time on new ideas that didn’t work.
• Inability to come to an agreement on what would be “good” (a bit of analysis paralysis).
• Failure to demonstrate or show the player the new mechanics in a clear, intuitive way.
• The level’s design (tying in to the last point, where it doesn’t utilize the mechanics well).
• The lack of a good “platformer feel” for the game.
• Having art assets that were really specific made adding new things to correct the game’s flaws near the end more difficult (this isn’t in any way a fault of the artist, so much as the overall planning for the game).

A lot of the bad comes down to just not having a fun idea and having too much conflict on what would work. When I look at the body of work for the three of us have done individually I’m confident we could have made something better than this in a different situation. Everyone in our group was really critical of their own pieces near the end; Larissa was making comments about how the perspective of certain assets were off (I didn’t notice, but I don’t have an eye for that stuff); Mat was sending updated and improved sounds even a bit into the submission hour (while the new ones were better, the old ones were certainly adequate); I was pretty pessimistic about most of the design choices by the end, and trying my best to fix what I could into something playable.

I suppose it’s natural for everyone to be hyper-critical of their own work. On the one hand it feels like a failure; the game isn’t very fun and doesn’t come close to meeting the potential the group had to make a good game. On the other hand, with all the issues we faced in it’s creation we did still did come out with a finished game which does feel at least a little satisfying. If nothing else I learned a lot more about game design and have a few new tricks in my game-making toolbelt.