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I hereby proclaim myself as the Botiman hi-score world record holder until proven otherwise.

I'm glad to see you got around to update the game, I'm surprised to see how much better it got with small changes and additions.

And I finally understood the sprite that represents Botiman while on the high grass! It's a tail! Like Botiboy's! I saw it as some sort of scythe and couldn't understand it before.

The original plan had heroes having special loot or buffs and the boss selecting different perks every wave, besides just the magic element, somewhat similar to what you mentioned. And certainly, I agree that there was more work to do with damage numbers, sadly the time limitations didn't allow me to test balance as thoroughly as I would have wanted.

Thank you for playing the game and for the feedback! Glad you enjoyed your time playing it!

I agree that visual clarity is something we could've improved upon if given more time. More visual information about elements' interactions would've been great indeed, so I'll be sure to keep it in mind! Thanks for trying the game and for the feedback! Glad you enjoyed playing it.

There's a lot of potential when it comes to interactions between evil characters just sharing a place like this, certainly enjoyed walking around and talking to everybody (needless to say, Greg was great... For a moment I thought I was going to battle him to get some EXP or something).

The combat was solid and didn't have any problems mostly just spamming attack and healing when needed... Which is good for a small project like this! Wouldn't like it if fights were frustraiting.

I was also expecting the archangel to somehow be Broderick's true form or something haha.

Took a while for me to get it, but I'm glad I did. It's a pretty unique concept with a lot of potential!

Thanks a lot for playing the game and writing a review, glad you enjoyed your time with it!

Visual feedback is certainly something I wish we had more time to add to. The turn-cooldown counter is a great idea that didn't even cross my mind! And it would've been great to let the player keep track of the heroes' buffs as well. Perhaps show a couple of things like elements more visually rather than through text. But you know how it goes, I am still very satisfied with what we managed to accomplish.

And definitely nerf that Rogue haha... Such a problematic little rascal she turned out to be...

I really liked the concept of this game! The animations are great, the names had me always chuckling. I can tell this was an ambitious project, but I respect how solid it turned out; even more considering you made it on your own. Props to you for consistently making interesting games!

Had a lot of fun with it, kept playing for a while!

Pretty fun idea, it controls smoothly and looks cute. Props to the team!

Thanks a lot! Glad you liked it!

The concept is amazing, really creative! Filling maps is usually something I enjoy very much in other games.

The graphics and music are nice, and props for making a game with high replayability in this short amount of time! Congratz!

I loved the character design and the "chance-ellor" pun. The "deck" building system is certainly deep and interesting! It was a great game.

The confussion with controls was part of the fun, really enjoyed my time playing it! The presentation was very nice, with the parallax background and the whole theme. Great job!

The game looks great and the procedural level creation that can be beaten in a variety of ways depending on the skills you have is certainly interesting. Amazing work!

And we are really excited to keep working on it now! Videos and comments like these make us even more motivated to keep going. We are really glad you liked the game, this video was so entertaining to watch, thanks so much for making this video!

Thanks so much for making the video and sharing it with us! Had a lot of fun watching it and hope you had as much fun playing the game.

I just finished the Alpha 1.0 version. The level design was pretty solid and so were the enemies, it will certainly get better as things to reward exploration and checkpoints are added (restarting a whole second level or room after falling was a tad frustrating).

There are three (or four) things I would like to point out.

1. The speed of the spear coming back. I understand it should take some time to punish the player so that it doesn't get thrown out without much thought, but perhaps based on distance (if the spear is far away from the player) or after some time (let's say, 2 or 3 seconds after the spear has been thrown) you can make it come faster. There were times where I left my spear behind and moved with the dashes, only to encounter an enemy and be left defenseless for quite some time while I wait for my spear to come back... This even happened to me with the second boss.
2. The dash ability might need a second or two of cooldown. It appears you'll want to have open areas for your rooms in the game, so perhaps a dash ability that lets you dash over and over without touching the ground will be hard to balance... You wouldn't want to design your level too restrictively, but having open areas might allow the player to just dash all the way to the other side (similar to how Kirby games mostly allow for the player to fly and avoid most of the game, so to speak).
3. The Jackalope felt a bit too slippery. And this is a big one for me. As I was getting acquainted with the controls, stopping after reaching max speed usually still moved me about half a block, and that made me fall. In the first level it was a small annoyance to fall to a lower level and have to climb back up, but on the second level it costed me a couple of retries. Perhaps look into it's acceleration a bit, or add some coyote time to allow the player to make jumps some frames after they fell from a platform.
4. A final one might be, although it depends on your design and how much it fits into what your vision for the game is, maybe you can go through the spear if you're coming from under it... Like a thin platform, if that makes sense... It would make climbing much smoother, you can even make it drop-through.

I've got a bug at the very start when I first opened the game were my A and D keys were swapped... It fixed itself after a while and I could not replicate it, sorry I can give more information on that... Also, W and S make the Jackalope animate but do nothing right now.
I've got a bug on my second playthrough, were fighting against the boss, I stayed near the gate and started attacking repeatedly without moving... Just as I was attacking over and over and I got hit, the boss died and this happened, perhaps the dead body pushed me inside.

Either way, I enjoyed it, you did a good job and should be proud of what you've accomplished. I've seen how detailed your updates on Twitter are and wish you nothing but the best!

You can find the same post-mortem in Google Docs form and a link to the spanish version here. 

First, to everyone who has been following the development of the Linja Project, we thank all of you from the bottom of our hearts.

For those who didn’t know, this game is being developed by a group of two people, basically an artist and a programmer. It’s also the programmer who’s writing this post-mortem. With all of that out of the way, let’s begin now, shall we?

The Experience

Devtober took us by surprise. We were not expecting this amount of attention and support. I’m very satisfied with what we’ve managed to accomplish, we achieved every goal we’ve set before starting the challenge (they were, however, very “realistic” anyways).

The interaction we had with people liking, retweeting and commenting on our posts felt amazing. I felt like some of you became our friends of us to a degree without a single word being exchanged between us.

All of us who took on the challenge have made quite some progress, haven’t we? A certain part of me was always hyped with the “We really are making a game that people from around the world are seeing and commending” feeling.

I could keep writing on and on about all of this, but it’s not what this post-mortem is supposed to do. Let’s continue.

The greatest takeaway

Besides the interactions and emotions, I’d say it was the use of arrays.

I’ve always been one to avoid using arrays, in any programming language. If I wasn’t going to show a grid on-screen, I’d usually prefer to just work my way around them. Then I came to a point where I needed to use an array to solve something (as early as day 2!), I couldn’t store Linja’s last safe position to retreat him to in case of being squished in a variable… What would happen if that last safe position wasn’t safe anymore?... I had to use an array to be able to go back even further to search for safe positions… And to my surprise, it did the job both exactly as I needed it and as simple as I wanted it to. Before I knew it, I wanted to use arrays for everything. Keyboard mapping, optimization of the aiming system, optimization of the level selection map, anywhere it would fit really.

Also, I was surprised with how much progress we’ve been able to make with so little time put into the game during weekdays. The thought of not having much time to do things held me back from making progress in the game for the longest time. Having perceptible progress done daily and having such a warm reception for a game that’s still so early in development rekindled my motivation to keep working on the game.

And of course, with how much we’ve made each day, it’s also a great thing the fact… well… the game has made important steps towards become a complete product, with many bug fixes, new features and polished mechanics.

The greatest struggle

Although rewarding, working on the game everyday besides full-time job and college was certainly stressing and tiring. We often made it just minutes before the clock hit 00:00.

Planning for updates that could easily be seen to show some progress being made was a bit hard too, I wanted to refrain from posting text updates citing bug fixes or posting an update of how things worked that weren’t very visible, e.g., changes to enemy-aiming and shuriken speed (thanks to @NeatGames for the recommendation!).

Using all our free time working on the game also meant sleeping late every day and putting some games and anime on hold.

So, what’s next?

The game is far from finished. We’ll keep working on it, although probably not at the same pace. The game now has a more solid base to stand on than what it had a month ago, we’ve learned things and have many things we’re eager to keep learning. We hope to have your support on the future as well, it really makes it worth it.

If you found this post-mortem somewhere else and have no idea what this is all about, you can head over to https://twitter.com/LinjaProject to check the progress on the game (both from Devtober and the future).

This fan art is probably the most valuable thing I take from this jam, thanks a lot!

If you're still up to it, you can check out our game at https://gjdz.itch.io/lost-little-light... It has a dog that you can pet!

Take a look at https://gjdz.itch.io/lost-little-light if you can... It has a dog and you can pet it!

If you're still up to it after so many games, please take mine a look... It has a dog that you can pet!
https://gjdz.itch.io/lost-little-light

It's so good I wanted to keep playing once I reached the end. Greatly done, loved the fluidity in gameplay and the art-style as well.

Thanks a lot!

I guess you can say that... The dog truly steals the spotlight *ba dum tss*

Forgot to promote that as a "selling point" for the game, but yeah, for anyone reading this, the dog can be pet!

Haven't gotten around to try many games, and the couple of games I tried were sadly unfinished...
Now, as everyone, I'll use this to to self-promote myself... But I have to mention that it has a dog you can pet https://gjdz.itch.io/lost-little-light