Post-Jam Feedback and Future Plans

Hey, so GMTK happened.

With how many IRL things got in the way of jamming, I almost wasn't able to put out a finished game. Nothing a 14-hour overnight solo dev marathon can't fix, though. 

I ended off with a game I was quite happy with, and it seems many fellow jammers felt the same, as it did well in the ratings for multiple categories. 

Based on the positive public reception and my own fondness of the project, I've decided to commit to making this jam game a full release! With all the bells and whistles and things you would expect from a real, polished product. 

Addressing Feedback

That being said, this game and I have a long way to go. To start, let's address some jam feedback:

1. Too Easy. Yeah, don't make last-minute balance changes when you're sleep-deprived. Several players reported first try victories, as well as many others echoing the easy difficulty of the game.
2. Clarity. UI and UX suffered as a result of rushing the game out for the jam deadline. 
   1. Important game information is reduced to a block of text in the top right
   2. The cursor often gets lost in the "sea of monochrome," as one jam reviewer put it quite well. 
3. Too Short. Suppose it's not an entirely bad thing if a criticism of a product is that the players want more of it. 
   1. Despite this point being a potential side effect of the "Too Easy" feedback, the game is pretty short and low on content, even for a jam game.

Some smaller but still relevant pain points some players brought up were the game feeling too overwhelming (can be remedied with easier introductory levels beforehand) and wanting the dash to have I-frames (easy to implement but will have to test to see if it is good for the game or not).

Solutions

After some playtesting and deep ruminating that would make Plato jealous, I've identified some possible solutions to these problems: 

1. After post-jam playtesting, the biggest cause for the easy difficulty was enemy bullets colliding with the central boss instead of passing through, significantly reducing the amount of pressure on the player at any given time, since the player spends a big chunk of time shooting at the boss.
2. Make some actual UI that I didn't have time to do during the jam. 
   1. Get rid of as much text as possible, ideally all the text(I'll probably keep text for the servers remaining, since I modeled the boss mechanic from D2 raids, where I know D2 has text in the objectives task). 
   2. Use visual indicators for everything, and work on making the UI pixel perfect to preserve the pixel artstyle.
3. The obvious answer is to just add more content -more bosses, arenas, and enemy types(which will obviously be secondary to the main echo enemy type, since that's the whole point). 
   1. Unfortunately, the scope of the jam and outside distractions limited my ability to make those, but there will be more in the future. 
   2. I haven't started planning how the greater gameplay loop and meta-progression will work, but I definitely need to start thinking about that.

Post Jam Update Plans

The post jam update will just include the first two changes - revamped UI and difficulty balance changes. This way, players will have a more polished demo-esque build to play with while I work on fleshing out the core gameplay loop represented in the build, as well as the story and progression framework supporting it. I might also refactor some code that was rushed in the last minute deadline marathon so that it's better to work with in the long run.

There won't be any new major content updates for a bit after the post-jam release, but I'll probably provide a couple design updates here and there. Once I've designed enough of the game to start seriously implementing it, you should expect a lot more cool updates art, dialogue, and music featuring actual content.

The difficulty stuff must happen before the cool and flashy stuff. Stay tuned for all of it in the months to come!