I think this post is going to be less organized than the last one, it's more or less the things I didn't cover before and I didn't plan this one ahead. Just like last time, beware of spoilers!
I wanted a name inspired by symphonic/gothic metal for the game, and ideally one inspired by Lucidity, Delain's first album. I kinda waited until the end for this and picked two favourite from a shortlist (which I had only started the day before) and jammed them together. I was leaning towards Shattered as a title because it could be interpreted as something bad or something good, but I felt it wasn't enough on its own. I listened to the Within Temptation album The Unforgiving and the intro track, Why Not Me, really made me think of Briella's story. So that's where that came from.
At first I thought it was a pretty decent name and that the slight awkwardness had a charm to it. Then I started making graphical assets and realized how awkward it really was. Oh, well. Naming things is hard...
If you've been following this devlog you'd be well aware that I started with the story sections and only started building gameplay halfway through. I really wanted to do a story driven game this time, so that's where I started. At one point that's all I intended to do, but then I realized that having a magical girl protagonist with lots of fancy powers and then not really letting players actually use them would be a huge disappointment.
At the end I wasn't sure if splitting my efforts was the right approach, versus focusing on pure gameplay or going the other way building a story-driven game with limited or no gameplay, but I've seen that some other entries in the jam have taken the "try to do both" approach so I feel vindicated somewhat. I was worried that I'd made a game that doesn't work well from either point of view, but I think I managed to strike a reasonable balance.
I still wish I'd been able to come up with something more unique for the gameplay versus just falling back to what I was comfortable with, but oh well. I think it works well enough, and stands out from the other games in the jam even if it's a bit of a repeat of games I've done previously.
I think I came up with the list of Briella's powers when I came up with the gameplay concept, but it also kind of went hand-in-hand. I gave her a set of powers that I thought would be fun in game. I really like games that let you jump and fly around, so power dash and power jump were easy choices. At one point the power attack was going to be melee only and she was going to have magic missiles for a ranged option but I felt combining the two was a better option... and also an easier one.
I managed to get I think about 70 percent of what I wanted into the game. I think I could have made it more like 75 or 80 if I'd put in a little more effort, but I was already pretty burned out by the time I submitted. In a lot of places I went with the easiest/quickest option or put in the minimal amount necessary, especially in some of the story bits and with the environments, with the intent of going back and fleshing things out, but that never happened.
Some of the things that were supposed to make it into the game but didn't are actually referenced in dialogue. For example, Ronn The Great's healing ability was going to be something you could use to heal allies, back when I actually thought there were going to be allies. Those were dropped pretty quickly, but I didn't change the conversations to reflect this. There's a fairly major non sequitur just before the field battle, where you can choose whether the guards will come with your or not, but it doesn't actually affect the battle.
There's also the conversation with Garrick, where it looks like you could convince him to stand down but you can't. I never wrote that path and cut it off early, though the epilogue actually checks for a flag that can never be granted. And early in the game there's a But Thou Must moment where you have to go and confront the bandits even if it seems like a terrible idea, because I didn't want to branch that deeply.
The somewhat awkward transition between the field battle and the village scene is because what I originally was going to do didn't work. I was going to have the rout occur in-game; all the enemies were going to turn and run away. I tried to do it the easy/hacky way, it didn't work, and I threw a cutscene in instead of trying to fix it because of time limitations. The village scene itself was gradually cut down as the clock ticked down toward the deadline: First it was going to be a gameplay sequence where you'd be able to wander around, then this was changed to a conversation for time, then it was cut down to a cutscene when I realized there's no guarantee that there'll be anyone there to converse with, then a single frame with text when I didn't have time to make the other graphics. At one point I even wanted to have multiple village battles with you getting weaker each time but this was cut pretty much immediately.
I also never had a chance to really finish the HUD. I ended up releasing it with the temporary graphics and missing the crucial features of flashing the health bar and screen in response to taking damage. I wish I had more time to flesh out the environments, too- they're very bare bones, and in my opinion it's detail that really makes them come alive in games.
I wish I could have done a deeper storyline with more character development and maybe dive into some of the lore, but I don't think that was ever realistic. I had more scenes planned out, but cut it down to the bare essentials early on and never had a chance to expand on it. I find it very hard to sit down and do the kind of thinking necessary for this in the frenzy of a game jam. Still, I think if I had focused on story and cut the gameplay sections I could have done more here. If I ever come back to this project I think this is where I'd like to focus.
Finally, I was going to do more complicated branching endings, with various decisions changing various parts of the epilogue, showing some more of the characters, and having more than one background graphic, but it was already a few days from the end of the jam when I got to that point. Between limited time and exhaustion, I ended up going with what I felt was the minimum necessary, meaning a "good" ending and a "bad" ending, plus a stinger that you may or may not get. It also has a very lame "thanks for playing" short video instead of a full credits sequence.
But overall I'm pretty happy with what I did manage to implement in time.
That went longer than I expected. I think I'm going to do one more post talking about where I might take this and going into some of the (ultimately unused) lore.