Feed The Machine - Postmortem
Heyho everyone.
First of all thanks to everyone who played our game and send in some feedback. Really appreciated them!
This is a small (yeah sure ...) postmortem and analysis of the feedback we received for our game Feed The Machine.
The Bad
UI
We tried a lot (especially with UI) and now we know better, I would say. We decided quite early that all UI-based information should be in the gameworld itself. In retrospective I have to acknowledge that it didnt worked out. It helps with the confusing and being stressed, but it doesnt feel like fun for the player. Should it helped to present the informations in a different way? Absolutly yes. It would have been possible to present the information just clearer in the gameworld but we didnt do it.
Now, why is this? Well you could say "its a jam, you're missing time to fix stuff like this" and it would be true if we didnt finished the development like 12 hours before the deadline. So there where enough time. The real reason is: we didnt see the issue here. After developing our own game, our own vision we were to focused and single-visioned that we didnt realized the problem. Simple issue but something to learn for the next time.
Tutorial
The tutorial was another bad point. It was to long and I have to agree with this. While I was hammering it together I already felt like "woof. This is a lot of information." What I didnt do was sit back and thinking about "What is the main goal you have to achieve." Only that would have been enough, the rest the player could have been figuring out by him/herself.
With more information on the UI (issue #1) it would had helped the player learning the game while playing too. This is way more fun than reading 3 minutes of text.
Other things
Player animation would have been nice, and I even tried it, but Unity gave me a hard time, so after one hour I dropped the idea. Number one priority is to finish the main gameloop, so I focused on that. Over the last weeks I practiced the animation system in Unity a bit, so I'm save for LD47. Still no idea what I did wrong while the jam.
The visibilty of all items wasnt that good all the time. Player missed things or where stuck because of no visible reason. Or they where stuck all the time, because the item-colliders were a bit ... not-fun I would say.
One more button would have been great as well. As you fix a ton of broken machines or pipes, your focus is on the machines. But if a machine is below a pipe it feels like a luck-based game what the player character will do. Fix the pipe or the machine. Having different buttons would have dealt with this easily.
And the last "bad" thing: I sill have the feeling the two of us arent good with coming up with "arcade"-games. Most of our games are resource management turn based games. Because we like stuff like this, stereotypical Germans that we are.But we're trying to come up with fun "arcady" games. Getting them to be fun is still a struggle for us.
The good
Even that we, as always, struggled with the theme we had a solid game idea really quickly. And we finished the jam like 12-ish hours before the deadline. Which felt amazing. Sure, there are some issues we could (maybe should) have dealt with but we didnt. Still, having that much time left was a bit confusing but great feeling.
The idea of having the UI in the gameworld felt fun to play around with. Sure, we screwed this up and there are better ways to do it. This was a motivating aspect while developing the game.
If I remember correctly we hadnt any real issues implementing all background mechanics. This was great too, this way we had a playable game relativly quickly, which isnt usual for us. This helped to take the time for some balancing (still, the game is pretty difficult).
Thats it I guess. We learned a lot with this game and, again, thanks for all the feedback we got. It helped to point out the bad stuff.
For the next jam I hope we jump back to our usual resource-management / turn-based games. With this and our previous game I have enough of stressful playthroughs :D
Have a nice day everyone, and I hope you're happy with the ratings and feedback you've got!
See you in a few month.