Hey there, thought I'd drop some stuff about Deep Root and whatnot. We didn't really have time to mess around with making progress updates on here, which is a shame because it would've been nice to be a part of the whole stream of consciousness! Either way, I'll talk about the game now.

We're happy with how Deep Root came out, but obviously the time spent hammering in features left little to actually balance the gameplay out. Some people complain that the game is too difficult, and others complain that it's too easy. Naturally, making a game in a 72 hour period will always come with these issues, but nonetheless I thought it was funny how there was a fairly large split in opinions on the game's toughness. A tutorial would've probably helped players, but we were strapped for time so it didn't get that far.

It's nice to see such positive feedback here and there as well, even if people were struggling to understand how the game worked (though we added a help screen with three pages of details and updates to the player's PDA to help players adjust to the challenges coming in the new day, but I guess it was either too difficult to understand for some people or they didn't think to read the help screen before dropping into the gameplay, but I digress). In keeping with the jam's spirit, we're avoiding adding any updates post-mortem until the voting period is over. It'd be cheap if we continued to work on a game after the 72 hour period, unless the reasons were technical (like crashes and other issues that straight up prevent the player from engaging with the game).

The art for the game was tricky. As the credits show, we had a handful of people working on the game's 3D models, and this naturally caused some issues with maintaining stylistic consistency. The models themselves were fine, but one of our artists started adding more texture details than was necessary and it kinda pulled away from the flat-shaded lowpoly look I thought we would go for, but in the end his decision was good. It would've came together even better if we had accounted for it at the start of the jam, that way all the models could've received the texture treatment consistently through development. Either way, I'm really proud of the team I worked with for this game, and I'm looking forward to Ludum Dare 47!

PLAY DEEP ROOT HERE: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/deep-root