Postmortem devlog thingy

Now that the jam submission period is over, it is time to write a postmortem. Or in other words, the not-so-epic tale of how I've done goofed. Please be gentle, this is my first time writing this sort of things...

After having worked mainly on visual novels for the past half a year or so, I decided it was once again time to try to make some RPG Maker stuff. This project was in many ways an experiment for me. I wanted to make something more focused on the combat and mechanics this time, and when I saw the theme for the jam I knew what I had to make: the good ol' climbing the tower trope.

But how could I make it different from every other game that has a tower you can climb? An idea came to mind: Make it a roguelike/roguelite. (For those unfamiliar with those terms: they are genres in which stuff is procedurally generated, so each run is different. The difference is that in roguelike, you restart from scratch upon death, but roguelites allow you to keep or unlock stuff that will make subsequent playthroughs easier.)

Eventually, I settled on a roguelite. As a jam game, I do want people to be able to complete it after all, and I felt that a roguelike might be too harsh for the average casual player.

Then, it came time to design the combat system. As a fan of tactics and strategy games myself, of course I wanted an engaging combat system that was more than just "spam your strongest skills lol". However, with such comes problems of its own. If I made it too hard, the average player would not complete the game. But too easy, and it defeats the purpose of the whole system. The solution? Post-game endless mode. The main story (or what little of it) can easily be cleared by the average player, while the endless mode offers a challenge to those who seek it. Overall, I think this aspect wasn't too bad, though I do think it could use a little more polish and scaling at the higher floors.

Now, lets talk about the bad. Or how I've done goofed.

Timing and scope

To be honest, I wasn't initially planning on joining this jam. After all, I had just finished another jam, and didn't think I'd have the time to make another game. But like, 9 days before the deadline, inspiration struck. I didn't exactly have much planned for these 9 days, so I figured, why the heck not? How hard can it be?

I have never been so wrong. Despite working all day on my game, in the end, I wasn't too satisfied with the end result. A lot of stuff had to be cut to make the deadline, and I didn't have enough time for thorough playtesting.

Pacing and animations

Naturally, I tried to design my battle animations as best as I can. A metal axe has to look and sound different from a metal bow, which has to look and sound different from a wooden bow. In retrospect, I think I might have spent too much time on this. A common complaint was that the animations take too long, and to be honest, I do agree with that. While unique and fancy animations might have worked well in my previous games which were much shorter and focused primarily on boss battles, this is a genre where, naturally, encounters with lesser mobs are far more common, so all that animation time does add up and get old really fast. My fault, sorry. :(

Inaccurate Assumptions

As someone who has played many games, I am no stranger to unconventional elemental systems, from Fire Emblem's weapon triangle to Pokemon's guide dang it spreadsheet of elements. However, I realise this is not the case for most people, so I tried to go with what I thought was pretty intuitive and was used by quite a few games: the Wuxing system, along with my own system for the three other elements I added in.

As it turns out, most people aren't exactly familiar with Wuxing. People were confused as to why ice resists fire (ice is classified as water, which extinguishes fire), or how wind/lightning were classified (they're wood, because they are generated by water and can generate fire). Granted, there is an F1 help menu, but most people didn't think to press F1... So yeah, again, I done goofed, sorrymasen :(

If there's one thing I could've done better, it would probably be to have some tutorials. Why the heck I thought that was a good idea to cut out when I was short on time, I have no idea. I am not a smart person. :(

The stuff I learned along the way

Well, enough brooding about my epic fails, time to talk about stuff I've learned. Personally, this was my first time using YEP_BattleEngineCore. In my previous projects, I avoided using it because I felt that it changed too much about the default battle system that I actually liked (please don't stone me for saying this lol >_<). However, as many other plugins require it, that severely limited my options. For this project, I decided to give it a try because why not, and I gotta say, I am glad I did. I think it worked out quite well for this project. But that's just me.

It was also my first time actually making playable maps, which admittedly is not my strong point. I've mostly avoided mapping in favour of just sending the player into battle via the menu, so this was most certainly a valuable experience.

As for other more general things to take away from this experience:

• Don't over-scope.
• Don't waste too much time on unimportant details. Have a minimum viable product before polishing.
• Just because something worked well previously, it doesn't mean that always holds true.
• Don't assume your player knows everything. Have in-game tutorials!

So yeah, that's it, thank you for coming to my TED talk postmortem. While the jam deadline is over, and I still ain't too happy with my final product, I have grown a little attached to it, and would like to continue fleshing it out and fixing the issues once the jam is over and I have more free time. So yeah, feel free to yell at me about how much my game sucks and how I should feel bad or something, and maybe check back in a couple of months or so.