CYGLiDE – Post Mortem

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=42418

Who am I?

Hi guys I’m Oli, from one man dev studio, Sizeable Games, you might know me on twitter as @OhCarson. Indulge me while I analyse CYGLiDE, my LD35 compo entry.

I do a lot of game jams using my favourite input device, the gamepad, every time, someone will say, “Hey Oli! I can’t play this game, cus I either have no gamepad, or am too lazy to plug in my gamepad.”.

This makes me very sad. A lot of the stuff I make subverts traditional expectations of control methods, I find things like analogue triggers, and sticks really fun to do stuff with. With that in mind, I set myself the task of using only the mouse as an input, nearly everyone has a mouse right?

Development

The idea was you would control the transformable “limbs” of a robot in different configurations. A “Glide” mode, and a “Walker” mode. Something in between Pilotwings and Jumping Flash. I threw together a robot bunny dragon thing, and set about animating the “limb” configurations into wings and legs. This took a while, but looks pretty good, people have been universally positive about the flying robot.

I decided to focus on the “Glide” mode due to time constraints. What follows is me trying my best to make the “Wings” feel right with the mouse movement. After making the animation look good, I implemented the movement, time was running out, so the walker mode was dropped, I made a basic terrain generator, added in some hoops to fly through, and a basic UI. It was a mad rush at the end to add in the “game” parts like scoring. But yeah, so I ended up with a complete game in 48 hours.

What Went Right

The simple Stylized graphics were a big hit, and my attempts at character modelling and animation also went down really well. Using simple colors and shading in unique ways is something of a hallmark of mine, and I think it paid off very well here. A lot of people loved the “Flap” mechanic, and in general CYGLiDE went over very well. People seems impressed that it felt like a full “slice” of a bigger game. The controls were seen by many as nuanced, but required mastery, which is fantastic. It’s a whole lot of content for a 48 hour solo compo game.

What Went Wrong

There were a few issues that soured some people to CYGLiDE. Most prominently, were some collision resolver issues. The collision in the game was achieved by a series of raycasts that didn’t account for speed and framerate, and one was going the wrong way! This lead to some people with lower framerates flying through things, and certain areas not detecting properly. This lead to the second issue.

CYGLiDE uses a non standard control technique, but has no real tutorial. This is obviously because it was made in 48 hours, but this caused some issues, particularly when coupled with the collision errors. The general solution to this would be to ease the player in, a concept at a time.

Some player had trouble with the concept on moving the mouse up and down to gain momentum, others were less familiar with flying game controls, throwing the player into the world without addressing these lead to some bad experiences, the thing is, there was literally no time to add in these tutorial sections, and as the game controls are, dare I say, innovative, people had problems. This lead to very polarising opinions, It either “clicked” or didn’t.

I feel that some members of the community could of maybe given me a break for these aspects considering it’s a solo compo entry, but I’ve learnt that people generally aren’t fussed about the creation process or constraints, and only the output, which is understandable

A version with fixed collision was added, and people seemed to be a lot more positive from there on in.

Summing up

I feel that given a bit more time, CYGLiDE could be an extremely immersive game, so I’ll be dedicating some time to working on it, and hopefully releasing it for a small fee. There’s a lot I feel I could add to it,so I’ll be working to make it the best game it can be.

Thanks for your time, please look out for more CYGLiDE in the future.

Follow me on twitter oritch.io for updates!

Oliver Carson

Sizeable Games

@OhCarson

https://ocarson.itch.io/cyglide

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-35/?action=preview&uid=42418