Caelum post-mortem

So after a bit of reflecting on our work I decided it would be good to write some thoughts down. I’ve read all the comments on our page and noticed a couple of recurring things, both positives and criticism.

We were really happy with the sounds and the overall juice in our game and it’s great to see that people who played the game enjoyed them too. The sound effects have received nothing but praise and the little screen shakes and flashes were also very well received. Also our background music has received much praise. The original intent was to have a film grain/sepia filter on the game to make the ragtime music fit better, but after finding out there isn’t a way to do it without the screen effects on Unity Pro, we scrapped that idea. The music stayed though, and it’s nice to see people liking it.

While praises and pats on the back are always nice to hear, the criticism and suggestions by the community are the most important aspect. The feature that received the most criticism was our decision to completely randomize all drops, a feature that in hindsight we could have implemented much better. We always wanted to have a random drop system but at the moment, the game is affected too much by the randomized drop chance of the portal element, the power-up which allows the player to progress in the game. Some people have had it drop so early each level that it only took them a very short time to complete the whole game, which of course is not an ideal situation.

Otherwise the criticism and praise has gone very even. Difficulty could’ve been lower for some people and for some people it was just right. Most people complimented the controls but we had also complaint of them being too slow. Enemies with patterns, better scaling enemies and polished art have also been wished for. From my point of view, all of it is fair and constructive. This was our first ludum dare and the level of comments has surprised me, all the criticism is reasonable and presented in a correct manner. This makes it very easy to pinpoint the good and the bad in the game, which is ideal.

We’ve had some preliminary talks of continuing the development of the game in the future but that remains to be seen. I thank all the people who played, rated and commented on the game because it makes the possible further development much easier. Everyone who hasn’t still tried it, here’s the link if you fancy yourself some arcade shooting.