So a week on from the jam (more or less) I thought it was worth putting together a post on some of the things that might have improved Pearls of Wisdom. All in all, both myself and @twilighttrinity are pretty happy with the game, and most of the feedback has been really positive!

If you haven't given it a go yet, try out Pearls of Wisdom

Starting On The Wrong Foot

One of the things I've noticed from people playing the game is that the instructions seem to be leading people to pick a random spot on the map to dive at the very beginning of the game. I'd assumed while putting things together people might be more inclined to get straight into a dive on the initial A1 tile of the map, so we'd sort of set the levels up around that assumption. To his credit, @twilighttrinity was pretty adamant we should've started people actually in a dive. I'd gotten a bit too in my head about it and decided it'd be a bit too much of a technical nightmare, but in retrospect, it probably would've been worth having a quick bash at it to see if it could be done without making too much of a mess of the code base. Our LD46 game turned into a bit of a mess of spaghetti code because I hadn't quite figured out a good way to keep track of player progress between different parts of the game, and while I think I managed a much cleaner solution this time, I was still wary that changing the way the game started up might be a bit fraught.

Diving Deeper

One thing we found quite tricky towards the end of the jam was configuring things like depths, oxygen levels and how fast your oxygen drops so the game is challenging in the right places. I'm not sure we really got this totally right as the game feels like it starts off quite hard and gradually gets easier. Balancing is definitely an aspect of game design I've not yet fully got a feel for and it's quite a tough thing to get right without a lot of time for play testing. This meant we played it a bit safe by not having any dives that went too deep in case we made those deeper dives too tricky. Another thing I'd liked to have done is add a bit more to do on the way down to the bottom, such as little caves to the sides and things like that. I can sort of see how I could have put this together, but as it wasn't absolutely top priority I didn't end up with quite enough time to add it without having to worry about breaking everything else.

It certainly might be interesting to come back to this game after a little while and add like a second map with some slightly more involved dives.

Parallax Scrolling

Getting the background colours gradually getting darker as the player got deeper and adding the fish going back and forth was something I was really keen to add in. It seemed like a very small thing that would add a lot to the feel of the game, and I do think it adds a nice level of polish that wasn't there for a lot of development against a very plain block colour background. As I was putting it together I did briefly experiment with adding in some parallax scrolling to make it just that little bit nicer. I'd written the code to render each row of tiles in the background to render at a time, so when the background was scrolling at a different speed to the player there sometimes ended up being gaps in the background which wasn't a great look! In retrospect it wouldn't have been too hard to build the whole background as 1 texture in the code and just render it all at once. Much more efficient, and no weird gaps! But sadly this was one of the later things I tried to code and my brain was deeply stricken by Jam Fog, so what seems like an obvious solution to me now just wasn't there at the time.

Spell Checking

I hadn't spotted I'd left a typo in the instructions until I watched @jupiter-hadley 's video - oops! https://youtu.be/bDsxxURqUQM

All in all, I'm pretty proud of this game!