Deep Descent Postmortem

This is my 3rd LD and this time I wanted to write a postmortem to share my thoughts and experience. Deep Descent is the compo game and you can play it here. It’

s a game where you have to get to the center of the planet by killing monsters and using your totally physically accurate harpoon gun that bounces off enemies and gains their power.

The Good

- Good concept: To make use of the theme we came up with the side view. A sectioned planet made the theme evident both visually and from a go
al standpoint: you can see your progress clearly and it’s not a very common concept to use a spherical world (I miss you, Populous 3!). To add gameplay to this idea we wanted an original weapon. Not just X diverse weapons, but one unique weapon that can function as X weapons. That way we came up with the harpoon gun. It makes use of gravity on a spherical world so it’s pretty unique to control, and it bounces off enemies acquiring their power, which makes for some cool combos.

• Diverse team: It was the first time I worked in a jam with so many people (4 programmers, 1 2D artist and 2 musicians). Most of the jams I’ve done

up until now were by myself or 2-3 people that were always programmers. It was a great experience to work with and coordinate so many diverse figures in the not-most-ideal conditions (but more on that later)

- Experienced team: Each of us had previous experience working on other games or jams, experience wi
th the tools we used and some of us had even worked together

• Good music and graphics: At the end of what seemed like the 1000th hour of programming I had barely listened to the music our guys had composed and hadn’t really paid much attention to the graphics, but I was amazed at the end to see how nicely everything fell into place together and raised the enjoyment of what I could only describe as “a buggy mess”. Erika‘s cute character design and drawings (made so the game could be enjoyable to her little brother) and Igor‘s and Roland‘s compositions gave life to everything!

The Bad

- Remote communication: We couldn’t find a place to fit so many people for 3 days so we made due with Google Hangouts. I all of the jams I’ve done I’ve always worked with my teammates face to face. Online communication is slower, and it gives you less incentive to work, because you’re not as committed as when you SEE your mates working constantly. It was obvious that organizing 7 people online would be a huge challenge, but considering this was our first time I think we managed to do it pretty well.
- Overextending design: “4 programmers can implement X amount of features” I thought. What I didn’t really consider was what would happen when 2 of them didn’t work full time on the project. They had told me this from the start but I was hoping to convince them to invest more. The design of the game needed 4 enemy types (and consequently 4 weapon types) and a boss to be fun. A layered design would have been better in this case (and in general really). Features that are most fun should be implemented first and the others left last. For a jam, I have come to believe that a single mechanic should be designed at the beginning. When that’s working it can be:
1. Polished: Juice it up and make it clearer/more fun
2. Extended: everything that falls in the “more of this” category
3. Scratched: if it’s just not as good as you though
- Lots of bugs: In the end we actually had 4 enemies, but their intelligence, attacks and powers given to you harpoon gun were all very bugged and unreliable. The teleporter to the next level works 1/10th of the time, and the player was even invulnerable when it was first published. While some of these bugs were patched and will continue to be patched soon, it was a terrible state for the game to be in for the voting stage.
- Lack of polish: If you’ve read this up until now this was obviously coming. There are things can be done to improve the experience, like the fact that you don’t have much to do on each layer except jump and kill enemies. The game mechanics are not clear and have to be explained before: you can’t tell what powers your harpoon has, you can’t tell what the objective is or how the teleporters work

Hope this was an interesting read and see you guys in 3 months when I’ll be using all the stuff I’ve learned.