Postmortem and the Future

So, the jam is over and it is time to have a look at what went wrong and what worked. Further, as it is obvious, that this game is far from complete, I want to elaborate on, how things will go forward after this. But first things first.

Bottom line, most things went well. That I overachieved was part of the play to some degree, although I undoubtly hoped to get a bit furtherm especially game play wise. The need of two major refactorings and a writers block, when designing the enemies were some impacts on this and being the easter weekend didn't help either. But at least the starting map reached the level of detail I hoped for, I had a proper editing and movement workflow and the interactive screens reached the versatility I intended in the first place.

The set dressing was a big issue. I planed to big, already mentioned that, but especially the swamp became such a big burden, that I left it - together with the tunnels - as a block out. To finish it, I defenitely need to develop some additional workflows, like intermediate prefabs to place, to speed up things. I'm happy about that learning and looking forward to develop this, as I feel, there is a lot of growth to experience from that. The greenhouse on the other side bothers me on a very different level, as my collection lacks a proper set of assets to dress it the way I intended to. Time will tell, how this works out.

The worst part of the experience was the actual game play. While the production itself delivered a lot of learnings and confirmations, creating a proper game play was a big issue, resulting in the mentioned writers block. This isn't the first time I experienced this at exactly this point and I have to conclude, that an interesting game play is something that comes hard to me. I definetly need to work on this and develop techniques and workflows to overcome this personal flaw. This is one of my motivations to continue the development, to get at least done, what came out of the existing ideas.

Technically, the project provides a lot of new aspects to my jam kit. No wonder, centric around the dungeon crawler genre. The whole dungeon, cell, interaction and location system is something to be reused in the next years jam, giving me more time to concentrate on the actual gameplay. This will continue with the features added since the end of the jam, especially today.

So, how do I plan to continue from that? My goal is to finish the game, which means, all set dressing and implementing the enemies eventually. Further, I see the need for some redesign in the dungeons, some need to get smaller, some bigger, maybe there will be even one or two new ones to flesh out the story and game play. I already invested another day of work, which resulted in:

• A loading screen between scene changes
• Comprehensive audio and visuals additions, including thunder and lightning
• Foot steps in all dungeons
• Finished the inventory, including reading the letter

I will be gone for a week of vaccation now and I don't plan to take the work on this game with me, but there are already concrete plans of the next stepts:

• Bringing the overlay message in the new game screen into the book
• Moving the gardeners room to a distance, where it is impossible to reach without solving the ghoul puzzle
• Reading the book requires encountering a ghoul before
• Preventing the enemies to step on the same cell as the player or create secondary positions to place them
• Making the loss of sanity more obviouse by sound and visual
• Added a threat sound to areas with enemies, as long as they cost sanity
• Finishing the mansion, most likely shrinking it in the process

The greenhouse, the swamp and the tunnels will be part of a later planning iteration, as I want to see, how things turn out with these next steps first. My estimation is to invest a similar amount in the rest of the game, as I did for the jam. I plan to leave the jam build here as it is to document the process and will create a new project page for the future development, after I returned from my vaccation. I'm not sure yet, if I will release intermediate versions during the further development or not, as the biggest disappointment in the comment is - no wonder - the lack of the actual gameplay. At least I plan to continue this developer diary, so feel free to follow me or the project.