Hello everyone. I used to be suuuper into posting a tonne of in-progress journal stuff during the jam, and I do still enjoy that! However this time around I had barely any time to spare, and violated more than a few of my usual healthy rules when it came to eating and sleeping :skull: not to be repeated, but this time I'd say it was worth it.

Making journal posts has become much more difficult since moving to UE4/5, because trying to fit high quality gifs that show off complex gameplay is near impossible with only 4MB to play with, and webm/mp4 animated embeds like imgur still don't work. :frowning2: I hope that gets sorted soon! Else I spend half an hour trying to compress a single gif and it takes all the fun out of it.

As a result, I have no fun progress shots unfortunately! But I did want to talk a little about my entry. And by a little, I mean I'm overcompensating massively and writing an essay to get all my post-mortem thoughts about the game on paper.

The premise

So I have a bad habit of tending toward combat systems whenever I'm given full creative control of a jam game. In truth, this is usually a bad idea, because complex combat systems are extremely difficult to make feel right in short order. In LD56 I resolved to do something I'd never tried to do before - focus more on a slow paced, narratively focussed game with absolutely no combat whatsoever! My friend and I achieved that nicely enough, so I kind of took this jam as... well, you could view it either as a nice treat, or a total relapse :laughing: because I decided "hey, what if I just tried to go all out and make as cohesive a melee combat system as possible?"

The novelty

Not only that, but there had been one thing bothering me about my game development skillset. I can make incredibly bad programmer art, I can code. I know enough about UI to at least... like, make it. I found I have a great passion for composing music, even if I'm not amazing at it. I even know a little about VFX. But I have always hated the visual side of things - and now I work pretty exclusively with 3D games, it was becoming very frustrating, feeling stuck with UE5 default assets, primitives, or using things like MagicaVoxel (which I've put to very good use in the past with Potion Seller and Necrowizardry!), but I'd bounced off Blender tutorials so many times. i'm not sure precisely what clicked this time, but I found a workflow that finally fit right for me. This was my first time doing the 3d modelling for my game, and I'm quite happy with how it all worked out! I've never thought myself capable of being able to make anything visual, and my models are totally functional! I actually had a blast making them too.

You can actually see that his turban doesn't have the tail or the side flaps. Originally I was intending for him to have them, plus a cape, plus a tabard thing. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to get cloth physics working. Technially the turban he's wearing in the game has cloth physics, but they don't really work, and it's something for me to look into!

The devil in the details

So yes! I felt that for all of my comfort zone of combat, I had a lot of big firsts in other aspects. Not to mention I don't think I've ever quite managed to nail satisfying melee combat before, and I think this time I might finally have cracked it. Even without VFX (flew solo this jam) I feel I managed to get a good balance of all the different aspects. When it comes to combat gameplay like this, prolonged interest and fun comes from a combat system complex enough to punish button-spamming and constant adaptation, but especially important is then having a variety of enemies that force you to use all of your toolkit. It's the number of enemies that really keep it interesting. This is why the second enemy type plays such a key role in the gameplay loop - even if you were good, you couldn't just stand still and parry, because of their unparrybale, very damaging special attacks. The third enemy type forces you to move and make use of the environment. The environment itself is definitely the weakest aspect of the game. Environment and level design is another weakpoint for me, one that I tried to tackle last jam but dind't wish to here.

It's interesting just how many subsystems are important to making combat feel cohesive and fair. You can be swarmed by enemies, but a key system I had implemented early was what I called Engagement. Enemies only actively attack you if they're engaged with you, and only a limited number can be engaged. Other enemies would remian close, and try to keep nearer engaged enemies with low health, so they could take their place. If the gap between you and the enemy grows too large, they'll disengage, allowing closer enemies priority. This Engagement syste mhas a huge impact on difficulty, and ensures the player shouldn't ever be totally overwhelmed, whilst still feeling powerful, like they're taking on a bunch of enemies alone. I could scale it up as difficulty increased, but not by much.

Other little nuanced subsystems one might not think about are things like points at which attacks become uninterruptable, the amount attacks thrust you in directions, i-frame balance, and particularly the way you choose to heal. I knew I wanted my healing system to both be directly connected to combat, and to be a good reason to force the player to move. It was a bit crude, but it was how the Shifting Crystal came about.

The setting and narrative

I have always wanted more representation for south-asian and middle-eastern aesthetic characters, and so I figured this would finally be a good opportunity to help contribute. I sadly didn't get time to weave in more of a narrative, but I had this idea from the beginning that you were the character from a fictional myth, the sort of demigodlike figures people tell stories about like hercules, stuck in the short story your life has become. Fights would take a day, then the sun would set and the player would reflect by the oasis as they healed. Each night there'd be a voiceover as the player reflected on themes of isolation, and of the expectations placed upon you by others. That all kind of got lost due to time, and so the remnant of that is just a momentary 10 second breather to get fully healed between days.

The result

In the end I'm really happy with the resulting game. For the first time in a long time, I have a real desire to keep working on my jam game, if only to make it what I wanted to originally - proper plannin allowed my system design to easily take in new enemy type, so I'd like to make the game a 7 day narrative experience with tonnes of enemies, maybe some bosses. I want to fix up some of the less great sound design, and - most importantly - redo all the voice lines! I've been super sick since last Saturday and you can hear it :skull:

If you've read all of this, then thank you! I typically dislike the posts that are just veiled "play my game" posts, so don't feel like you need to, I'm continuing to rate games. If you do want to check it out, I'd love to see if anyone can beat Day 5. It's bloody difficult! You can see it here

Also, I'll take this a chance to plug the two excellent jam entries by friends of mine! Nine Lives Deep and Archaeologic. Thank you, and looking forward to seeing more of your entries as I go through the smart filter.

And now... I can rest.