Forty Two Post Mortem

[Game Link])
I’ll be honest, I didn’t initially like the theme. But me and the team hadn’t done LD in a while, and for once everyone was free (well, kind of) – so here we are! Brainstorming for us is generally hard because everyone is in a different time zone (even with 12+ hrs apart), so we quickly decided to add the theme in ridiculously – by using the Level Select menu to tell a story. Despite prior experience in jams telling us that puzzle games aren’t exactly a good genre for game jams (specifically for feedback when people are speed-running through games), we rolled with it anyway. Still, puzzle games are fun to make, so there’s that.

So, Forty Two’s basic idea is to get particles to generators of the same color, leaving no stray particle behind. Two particles of the same color bounce off against each other, and two particles of different color neutralize and form a block for other particles to bounce off against. This is the core mechanic of the game, and our starting point.

Let’s get to what went wrong and what went right from there on:

What Went Right

The use of theme – I feel this was a unique way of implementing the theme. Vague relation with the actual gameplay, but strong relation with the level select screen. Of course, it had its downsides (discussed later).

The core gameplay – The idea on which the puzzles are based is flexible, and easily expanded upon. This worked in our favor, and we had multiple mechanics up and running quickly (although half of the final day for me was fixing bugs in those very same mechanics). We could have a wide variety of levels just based off a few simple things.

The polish: Could have been better, but for the time frame – we fixed every bug we came across, gave as many affordances as possible, and even explained things visually without a tutorial. We wanted a minimalistic design, since Pranjal (the artist) is moving 2 days later and was kind of busy – and we got the design halfway right I’d say. We had more plans for some blending and particle effects, but ignored that in favor of more levels – so we’re almost there.

Scoping: Well, not entirely, but we set out to do 16 levels. We did 16 levels, so tehre’s that. We did have to compromise on the visuals and effects a bit for that unfortunately.

What Went Wrong

The use of theme – The downsides to having the theme so vaguely implemented and not in the gameplay is that people are going to miss it, since the story mostly unfolds at the end of the game (which I’m assuming most people won’t see). The idea was to combine each level screen into a pyramid and show the “story”. (SPOILERS BELOW).

Planning – Not a new thing. Having participated in 15+ game jams, this is the one thing that consistently goes wrong every time. I got the mechanics running up very early, but the same fast way of doing it made it harder to fix bugs later. There were things that would have made designing levels easier later by automating things – which I didn’t plan for earlier, so had to manually do later – which increased time taken and hence, scope.

Level Design and Progression – Now of course, this didn’t go terribly and I’m pretty proud of the levels we made, but when you’re designing puzzle levels this fast – that inevitably leads to less playtesting. As a result of which, there are multiple solutions to a few puzzles (not necessarily a bad thing). The main problem however, was in pacing and difficulty. I have seen while developing puzzle games for jams earlier, that our minds tend to make really hard puzzles and we find it a lot harder to make easier puzzles. Pretty much the same thing happened here, and while we felt the difficulty spike was too high, we couldn’t really do much about it in the time frame.

The HTML5 build – GM:S handles some functions in the HTML5 version and executable function differently, which led to the HTML5 version frequently crashing. It took a long while to pinpoint and fix after players pointed it out (yeah, post-Jam fix) – and may have stopped a few players from trying. I was testing on the executable, so this completely skipped by me (again, lack of playtesting!).

Well, that’s about it for my 17th jam! Back to playing more of these amazing games – incredible work everyone!