Super Fair Trial Show – late post mortem!

Hello, everybody! Better late than never, here goes a quick post mortem for Super Fair Trial Show! You can find a more complete description in our blog, if you’re into blogs and stuff.

What went right:

• Most people seemed to enjoy the shoot-dodge-shoot-rules changed oh crap where’s my weapon-dodge some more gameplay!
• Tons of procedurally generated stuff! I know, replayability doesn’t count too many points in Ludum Dare since most people play each game 15 minutes or less. Still, I always love making it! Why? Because!
• Low res + pixel grid + realtime lighting. It even makes our rushed pixel art look passable! 😀
• Multimedia Fusion. I’m always complaining about it, but truth is it just wouldn’t be possible to make all these systems work in 72 hours in a platform we didn’t know so well…
• Tweets! Everyone loves tweets! BTW, here, have some more tweets!

What went wrong:

• Difficulty curve. The game does feature progressive difficulty, but we didn’t have time to make the procedural AI follow a smoother progression, resulting in some levels being too easy and others ridiculously impossible!
• Controls (or making the controls more clear). Many people didn’t get the “Hold J to shoot without turning your character” command and thought it was some control glitch
• Enemies are too damn ugly! They were designed to be ugly, but they turned out much uglier than I planned! hahaha

Hhere, take another screenshot. People love posts with screenshots! 😀

A couple remarks on the ’10 Seconds’ theme

When the theme was announced, we honestly didn’t like it at all – 10 seconds sounded like too little time to convey any relevant gameplay! Of course, it is totally feasible to create good games that somehow only last 10 seconds, as proven by many great games developed by fellow Ludum Darers! I guess we just wanted to make an arena shooter where each match lasted longer than 10 seconds, and that’s why we ended up going for the “every 10 seconds the rules change” approach. We think it worked well!

This is one of the great things in Ludum Dare – by committing to the restrictions, you have to leave your comfort zone and experiment. In the case of Super Fair Trial Show, the constant rule changes during the fight really spiced it up a lot and made the game much more interesting than it would be if we didn’t have to fit the theme at all!

The future of Super Fair Trial Show and other random stuff

We’re making an action-RPG-exploration-something game based on Super Fair Trial Show’s gameplay and systems. As you can guess it’s not an arena shooter, but it will inherit a lot in spirit from its father game! By the way, by all means we haven’t abandoned the development of The Journey of Eko! It’s going strong as always; this other game is a faster, parallel project that doesn’t rely on difficult-to-create content as much as Eko, so we saw it as a nice project to fit between Eko’s builds. There’s a little more info on this side project together with Super Fair Trial Show’s complete post mortem in our blog – feel free to take a look! :)

Other than that, I just want to thank the whole community for all the encouragement and support. As always, it is a pleasure to jam with you guys!

Regards!

Gabriel and JP

aka Pixel Cows