Firstly, sorry for neglecting to write a post mortem last time I entered in LD24, after the first couple of days of voting I kind of disappeared and didn’t come back till recently.

Secondly, if you haven’t played Descent, have a look over here

Here are some screenshots:

A little bit about the game:

Descent is a sort of odd game. I didn’t really know what I was going for, I just sort of went along with what I was doing to see what came out of it. I ended up with a sort of paper plane/flappy birds cross that was much moodier than either, and centered around exploring underground caverns.

You play as a sort of droid, and you’re meant to pick up various treasures. At one point I planned to do a short cutscene at the start whereby a couple of archaeologists launched you down into the cave, but I decided against that idea and instead to focus on the mechanic itself.

What went well:

The controls.

I managed to develop a pretty unique control system, and it’s quite an interesting thing to play with and get used to.

The graphics.

It’s a very simple style, walls and corners are smooth, and there’s a static lighting effect. The text somehow seems to add to the feel of it.

The mechanic.

The end result is not really something I’ve seen done before.

The menus.

I got these done incredibly quickly, and they don’t look half bad. There’s a considerable amount of options to explore, including enabling/disabling music, sound effects and lighting, and changing the difficulty.

The plugin API.

Would do again. This was less work than I expected, and includes a decent system for plugins to hook into. It was also a lot of fun to do.

The map editor.

This made map creation considerably less difficult, and also allowed me to release something that other people could use to create maps.

 

What didn’t go so well:

The controls.

Although it’s a unique system, perhaps because of this, a lot of people disliked it and how it handled. A few alternatives I’ve been thinking about have been pressing a key gradually steering you towards a point or using the mouse and clicking where you wanted to go (which I couldn’t get to work within the 48 hours). I’d like this to be a modifiable thing in the menus somewhere. Meanwhile, if someone wants to make a plugin to switch the PlayerController, feel free 😉 just might need to use reflection to do so

The map loader.

For some reason, this took longer than expected. The end result wasn’t bad, but I had to go through numerous hoops to get something that worked. Glad it’s there, not so fun to implement though

The difficulty.

A lot of people have been complaining about this – while I can clear the included level in one run on normal difficulty, collecting all of the artefacts and scoring 600+, not everyone can do this it seems. A lot of people got stuck on the initial couple of rooms. Which is a shame, as the music develops a lot as you continue on. I’ve been thinking about making easy “snap” to each direction, change normal to the existing easy, hard to the existing normal, and insane to the existing normal with one life. (Also, hard and insane are pretty much impossible currently)

The music.

Although a lot of people liked this, I wasn’t happy with it personally. It was fairly randomly bashed together, and wasn’t really something I enjoy listening to most of. There are nice sections, but I don’t enjoy the overall feel of the piece.

 

Anyway, look forward to joining in again some other time. I’ll try and make LD30, but no promises.