Post-mortem II of "Please the Gods"

Hey everyone, it's Tuile again! After giving myself a decent amount of space and time to reflect on everything that happened since the start and end of the jam, I decided to do my final post-mortem solely focused on our entry, "Please the Gods".

While I've talked at length about expectations and outcomes of the different game/jam elements in Postmortem I, there were things I didn't get to quite touch on, since the jam wasn't quite finished for me once the deadline itself hit.

In this postmortem, I plan to discuss:

• Post Jam Backlash
• The Rating Period
• Marketing and its Benefits
• Various Feedback on the Game
• Thoughts on Recent Playthrough of our Entry

Post-Jam Backlash

I've been sleeping less well after the jam ended, simply because my body had gotten used to the longer hours of deep work, and I yoyo-ed quite a while between playing catch up with work, and crashing and needing rest. I'm still not quite recovered yet, but it gave me a chance to reflect on the flaws around my current way of dealing with high pressure/grindy life events. I've been using the past weeks to change the way I assess time and my usage of it. Hopefully, the next time I have to grind away at something, I'll do it in a more sustainable manner that doesn't produce the same effects.

The Rating Period

While I had been ready to give my full attention towards the jam itself, I had not been prepared for the rating phase that lasted another 10 days or so. Setting some time aside almost everyday to play and rate games only added to my post-jam backlash stress, not to mention that I now needed to keep the visibility of the game going in the server to some extent.

While I did end up enjoying a fair few of the games I tried, I could only review and rate 11 games properly, and had to give up on trying as many as I had originally wanted to. On the other hand, it gave me a much better idea of what worked and what didn't during a game jam, and allowed me to appreciate the talent I got to participate with this time around.

One thing, for example, was that we had truly made the right call in providing a WebGL version of the game. We had a 48.5% view-to-play conversion rate, with 89.7% of them preferring to play directly from the browser. I personally preferred that choice as well, as it allowed me to cut down how long I spent on each game.

What I hope to understand better, is how to convert plays-to-ratings better. We had 16 ratings in total, resulting in a 16.9% play-to-rating conversion rate. It could just mean we had many friends trying it out, but I'm wondering how many participants just played and didn't bother to rate it.

Marketing and its Benefits

I noticed that keeping the game visible in the server and pushing content regularly enough created more opportunities for people to feel intrigued in trying out our game.

I pushed about one teaser/art-related post per day during the last few days of the jam, and I felt it helped not only in increasing the number of ratings we got, but also motivated me to stay on task properly, so as to not drop the ball on the final thing. While there was a dip in the number of ratings for a few days after the jam deadline, the post-mortem brought back some attention to our entry, and there were a fair few more people playing the game. 

While I know that this added workload to what I was already doing, I felt it was the right call to make, and contributed at least somewhat to our final placement in the results.

Various Feedback on the Game

I'm grateful to the people who left ratings, but what really shined for me during the ratings period, was the thoughtfulness of some of the comments we received in terms of feedback. The insights peppered throughout, allowed me to think more about what I could have done better. I was more than happy with the breakdown of stars, though I wish we had more feedback from those who left 1 stars.

If there was one thing I can say, it's that I was a tad disappointed on our scoring on Historical Accuracy and Thematic Relevance, as I paid attention to every element that was depicted to be historically accurate, and we'd been okayed in terms of thematic relevance by the hosts. 

Thoughts on Recent Playthrough of our Entry

I played our entry again, and since it's already been a good 3 weeks since the deadline, it gave me enough time to distance myself from it, and look at things more objectively:

• No immersion due to lack of in-game tutorials. The prompts that tell me what to do pass by too fast, and I wish we could have paid more attention to this.
• Resolution of environmental/level art differs from the character assets, and should have been kept to the same scale in-engine.
• Mini-games were far too long and repetitive, and the lack of punishment made them uninteresting. This should have been part of the focal point of what made the game fun, not a chore as it turned out to be. Cutting the length of the current mini-games by at least half every time would have been a better choice.
• Spawn rate ratio of coconuts:leaves could have been better balanced in the coconut game.
• Drop-shadow on menu text doesn't look good.
• Placement of dialogue, as well its font color wasn't amazing. The dialogue boxes not being functional for the entry definitely hurt visibility here.
• Missing transition scenes, like the Chief coming out of the hut with the pig, or the basket of offering during the offering scene with Cook, decreased comprehensibility. Corners were cut, and it shows.
• Breathing animation for Cook is too rapid.
• Cook's sprite was sliced slightly inaccurately, leaving some extra red pixels during the Keep em' Cookin' game.
• I realize how awkward the run/walking animations look now for the chief. Definitely need to refine this for the next characters I design.
• While the soundtrack is great, it's a shame we couldn't bring in more of the music that had already been created into the game. Would have brought so much more life to it!

Conclusion

Plenty of takeaways, am looking forward to applying everything I learnt to whatever I get to work on. I'm grateful for the HAGJ 4 journey, and for our entry placing 19th with my team! Onto the next one!