Deepest Sword: A Post-Mortem
First, we wanted to give a huge thank you to all who have played our game!
We did not expect our little jam game about a funny knight with their tiny sword to get such a big reaction, and we want to thank everyone for their kind words, their excitement, and their rage playing our game. We never would have thought we’d have gotten almost 1000 ratings-- you all are incredible!
In this post-mortem, we’d like to share some of our processes and thoughts while making the game.
The first night the team started the ideation process by noodling through a bunch of different ideas based on the theme “deeper and deeper”. We made a brainstorm doc and put down everything from a game-within-a-game, to a platform digger, to a deep space Pokemon Snap. Eventually, during dinner Rosypenguin exclaimed “Drive it deeper into its heart”! This became the inspiration for Deepest Sword. After voting on the idea, we began to flesh it out by creating some quick mock-ups and describing key gameplay moments.
Our “ideastorm” document where we put our initials by our favorite ideas.
Next was engineering. Strega put together a quick playable prototype on the dawn of the second day. He made sure the gameplay mechanics felt fun and responsive using placeholder art before creating the rest of the game structure. He also focused on making tools and shortcuts to be able to quickly test different aspects of the game making tuning and level design a lot faster and easier.
On the third day, Strega focused on designing the stages and tuning the movement mechanics. The goal of each area was to ramp up the difficulty while also focusing on a specific method of using your sword. To make the game deeper, earlier levels had to be designed in such a way that longer swords forced you to rethink the puzzles.
For the art, Rosypenguin wanted to try out LDTK to build the levels. The tiles she built for Deepest Sword were inspired by the Cavernas tileset by Adam Saltsman but given its own dragoney flair. She also picked five distinct color palettes to represent the increasing difficulty of the cavern. As for why a cute dragon for the boss? Well she likes to draw dragons, and asked herself “how can I make this dragon different?” and slapped on some eyelashes…
The sounds didn’t come in until later. Strega used JFXR to create the sound effects and Animalese.js to create the fun dialog effects. Tenlki made a fun, addicting track to use as the BGM. He had a bit of an artist block coming up with a fitting song, playing with different styles and scrapping at least 3 different tracks. He wasn’t originally happy with it, but all the feedback about the song and hearing people sing along with the track while playing changed his mind. Listen Here!
Before the last day, Strega had uploaded a build of the game to Itch.io and submitted it to the LDJam site just in case we wouldn’t have time to work on the game due to having to go back to work on Monday.
We woke up on Monday ready to start a regular work day-- and out of nowhere we saw that we were getting comments and plays already! That’s when we learned that AlphaBetaGamer posted a review of Deepest Sword overnight-- and on a pre-release build too! With the increasing number of views, Rosypenguin scrambled to take the day off work and put together final versions of the title image and ending screen (inspired by some of the... interesting comments that were coming in). Strega was able to also get in some additional polish elements such as screen transitions and VFX. And Tenlki got in the final version of the music, just before the deadline.
The weeks since had been a whirlwind. AlphaBetaGamer’s video reached over a million views, it got viral on TikTok, spawned several pieces of fanart (many NSFW ones), and built up a small but dedicated speedrun community. We are always delighted to see streamers and VTubers play and react to our game, and have jumped in and interacted a few times too!
We have a few plans on the horizon to add more options and support for this little game. No promises on new levels or expansions, but we’ve already listened to the fans and added in frequently requested features such as key rebinding and volume control. There’s also plans for a Steam release. Please join our Discord to share your ideas, speedruns, fanart, or just ask us questions!