Design Postmortem

Eternal Rest

Menu art

In our team of two I was both programmer and designer. The programming part was nothing exciting, I wrote an A* and a simple dungeon generation, nothing earth shattering. Both design is a different thing.

I work as a professional game programmer, so I have all the background an opportunity to make games. And I was always interested in game design, made a couple of (unfinished) games. This jam was interesting because I had to design as much a game as possible in as little time as we have, especially besides programming. Unity helped a lot on the later part, which is big plus. I certain that we couldn’t produce a game like this with my (self written) engine.

The good:

• Familiar theme and genre: Dungeon hack and slash is not a new thing. It was a good decision to go for it, less time needed to figure out unique gameplay concepts which would otherwise be needed.
• Pixelart look: This was mostly my artist friend’s decision, who made all the content for the game. We started (and stopped) a similar looking project months ago, but the experience remained. All content here is new, but he could replicate the look and feel of the old project more easily than creating a new style.
• Balance: The whole game balance was quite last minute. I had values set up for the game (damage, health, speed, etc…) from the beginning, and they mostly seemed to work in the end. I had to change only a few of them in the end, a bigger part just worked. Surprising for me… :)
• Enemy variety: There are 4 types of enemies, normal and boss version of each. I know it’s not perfect, but I think they do their parts. The fighters are simple close combat enemies without much of a thing. The rogues are a bit more interesting with their invisibility (other than the lack of hint about them being there) and trap disabling feature (not communicated). Wizard is the basic ranged enemy, nothing fancy other than able to see the player even when invisible. And clerics are changing the battlefield quite considerably without killing the player immediately. All in all based on the playtests I saw they do their job splendidly. Compared to the scope of the project, of course.

The neutral:

• Map generation: It’s not horrible at the moment, and actually it is the first piece of code I wrote, but not great either. I’d say that some design touch would have been needed there to make it more interesting, other that tweaking variables to generate more or less open spaces and various size of maps.
• AI: Same as above. Does it’s stuff but not shining. You can separate the group as intended, but mostly you can do that with running around like crazy and suddenly hide behind a corner. My ideal way would be to actually use the treasures and traps to lure them away, and they should have been shouting for help limiting your time to kill the stray ones…

The bad:

• Player feedback: This is the part where the game is only half done. We have sounds and blood spills, even some UI, but more would be needed. Like invisibility indicator (both player and enemy), minimap, opponent health display, more particle effects (blood when hit, death, holy sigil casting, etb…). Sadly we had no more time, so this is the area which was lacking in the end.
• Abilities: The health absorbing touch attack was fine, and I’m mostly satisfied with the shooting spell as well, but the traps and treasures are not like I imagined them. I wanted to add some ambush like gameplay, where you lure some enemy off the group, force them into traps, etc. Right now they are barely usable. And one ability was never made but it has a control button mapped.
• Variety: In sense of game experience. I might be harsh to myself, but I think that a game has maybe two kind of approach and not more. Mostly because of the above mentioned ability problems I think. Some earlier gametesting would might highlighted this earlier. Did I mentioned that pre-submission playetest was done the way that I told the artist to play the game 30 minutes before times was up? Not enough clearly…

All in all, I’m satisfied with the game as it is. In this short time we did a decent job, and I learned a lot about design decisions and gut feelings. I hope you enjoy the game as much as we enjoyed making it.

I’ll write some more if you are interested in it. Feel free to comment or ask about details.

You can try it here.